Psycho Babble
A blog about language with posts each Thursday by Jessica Love, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her article about pronouns, “They Get to Me,” appeared in our Spring 2010 issue.
Should Two Constructions Diverge - Feb. 16, 2012
In his poem “Dust of Snow,” Robert Frost writes that a snow dusting Has given my heart / A change of mood rather than Has given a change of mood / To my heart.
Science Frictions
A blog about science with posts each Wednesday by Priscilla Long, the author of The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life. Her essay “Genome Tome,” which appeared in our Summer 2005 issue, won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.
Blue Notes – Feb. 22, 2012
“Blue,” writes Alexander Theroux in The Primary Colors, “is a mysterious color, hue of illness and nobility, the rarest color in nature. … It is the color of anode plates, royalty at Rome, smoke, distant hills, postmarks, Georgian silver, thin milk, and hardened steel. … ”
Class Notes
A blog about the art of teaching, with new posts each Tuesday by Paula Marantz Cohen, a distinguished professor of English at Drexel University and the author of the novels Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death and the SATs and What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper.
Tracking - Feb. 21, 2011
Several years ago, I taught a freshman honors English course in which I asked students how they thought they’d qualified for the class.
All Points
A blog about American culture, with new posts each Monday by William Deresiewicz, author of A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter.
Fiction’s Revenge - Feb. 19, 2012
Everybody always gets enraged when one of those sensational memoirs—I was a teenage transgendered prostitute; I was a part-white, part-Native American foster child in South-Central Los Angeles; I was fed through a concentration camp fence by a little girl whom I accidentally met again, and married, years later—turns out to be a hoax.
Browsings
A blog about the odd pleasures of the bookish life, with new posts each Friday by Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic with the Washington Post and the author of several books, including An Open Book and On Conan Doyle.
Style Is the Man - Feb. 17, 2012
In the first of those casual essays that make up The Spectator, Joseph Addison declares: “I have observed that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author.”
