Anecdotal Evidence

Luigi Galvani (1737-98) was an Italian physician from the age of non-specialization, when a curious, enterprising man or woman could do basi...

The writer who has died since I launched Anecdotal Evidence, whose subsequent nonexistent work I’ve missed the most, is probably Tom Disch (...

Seamus Heaney somewhere said true poets always know the names of wildflowers. Certainly, he knew “Lupines,” and his poem  “A Herbal” is a ...

One of my annual jobs as a boy, self-assigned, was tending the portulaca that grew along both sides of the driveway -- hundreds of plants in...

In the epilogue to the third volume of The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-74), Shelby Foote describes the origins of Memorial Day and recounts...

“The whole insincere suggestion of most churchyards now is that life has been spent in a vale of tears: a long tribulation, merely a prepara...

In junior high school, in a closet-like room just off the cafeteria, was a bookstore displaying several dozen paperbacks arranged on wire ra...