Anecdotal Evidence

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 “...

Walter Jackson Bate tells us in his biography of Dr. Johnson that as he aged, the crusty old man mellowed. “[I]n many ways,” Bate writes, “h...

Neighbors gave us a sack of golf-ball-size peaches from the tree in their front yard. I’ve been watching it for months through the front win...

We all do it, even the most sophisticated and open-minded among us: we draw conclusions about people based on their physical appearance. Sur...

A reader in North Dakota tells me he has acquired Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press...

I was seated in the waiting room of the physical therapy center with the rest of the human wreckage. Two men were seated to my right, speaki...

I have a typically human taste for taxonomy, classifying things, sorting them into categories. There’s comfort in order. A friend in Los Ang...