Anecdotal Evidence

As the human world seems to grow more chaotic, as though entropy were finally triumphant, I look for evidence of pattern and design in natur...

“I believe that it behooves the living, for our own sake, to keep the memory of the dead alive and vivid . . .”   That’s William Maxwell i...

“A dull country magistrate gave Johnson a long tedious account of his exercising his criminal jurisdiction, the result of which was his havi...

Among my teachers when I was young was a man I never met. In fact, he had died several years before I enrolled in his school. Oscar Williams...

I had seen the phrase before and guessed correctly at its meaning from context but still found the expression puzzling: “widow’s weeds.” It ...

A pivot or lasting change of focus occurred to me as a teenager. For years, since probably late toddlerhood, I had thought of myself as a bu...

In a letter to his friend the Rev. William Unwin, written in March 1784, nine months before Dr. Johnson’s death, William Cowper says he is “...