Anecdotal Evidence

Almost the only thing I ever write down so I don’t forget it is the grocery list. Sporadically I kept a diary when younger but each time the...

Berating people seldom works. Mostly it keeps the berater amused. Few of us revise our thinking or behavior because someone tells us we shou...

The superb American poet X.J. Kennedy died this morning at age ninety-six. Dana Gioia writes in an email: “I don’t have to tell any of you...

Architrave entered English in Shakespeare’s day by way of Latin and Italian. It describes the bottom portion of an entablature, the horizon...

O ur dog has gotten too old to catch opossums. In his prime he could charge across the backyard, leap and grab the marsupial crawling along ...

“[P]erhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have ...

Like most middle-class Americans I have lived a sheltered life. My needs and many of my wants have been satisfied. I was in a few fist fight...

In a 1951 letter to Bernard Berenson collected in Letters from Oxford (2006), the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper writes:   “I, unlik...