The end of the witch hunt
My sincere thanks to all those who commented on the recent posts. I have never heard about the rule about one day referring only to the future.
We the Men
Amidst the flurry of headlines about the Trump administration’s first weeks in power, who will notice that the federal government’s largest agency no longer celebrates Black History Month or Women’s History Month? The Department of Defense’s January 31 guidance declaring “Identity Months Dead at DoD” may have been lost in the news cycle.
At Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop
Most histories situate the birth of feminism in the United States at the Seneca Falls Convention, held on 19-20 July 1848, in upstate New York. Yet as I researched and wrote Bright Circle: Five Extraordinary Women in the Age of Transcendentalism, I came to believe the movement had its roots almost a decade earlier and in a most unlikely place: the Boston bookshop owned and operated by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.
Witches and witchcraft
Right after the appearance of the post on hag (March 5, 2025), I received a letter with a question about the origin of the word witch.
The hag’s revenge and vindication
This is an essay on the word hag, but let me first thank those who have commented on the latest posts, corrected the mistakes, and made suggestions.
Does it matter if what I do doesn’t make a difference?
Moral vegetarians think that we should not eat meat because doing so wrongfully harms animals. One response is that, in any typical case, purchasing and eating meat will do no harm. The animal has already been killed, and markets are not so sensitive that an individual purchase or meat meal will lead to additional animals being killed.
Making economics more human
As the “official doctrine of neoclassical economics, enshrined in all respectable textbooks,” the esteemed game theorist Ken Binmore says, revealed preference theory “succeeds in accommodating the infinite variety of the human race within a single theory simply by denying itself the luxury of speculating about what is going on inside someone’s head. Instead, it pays attention only to what people do.”
Five inspiring biographies for Women’s History Month [reading list]
In honor of Women’s History Month, we are celebrating the lives and legacies of inspiring women throughout history that played path-breaking roles in shaping philosophy and literature. This reading list features five books that amplify the achievements of these women who were either overshadowed by men, or subject to hierarchical thinking.
Elizabeth Taylor’s working women
In the 1950s and 1960s, actress Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011) was one of the most famous women on earth, someone to put alongside Queen Elizabeth II and Jackie Kennedy. Her complex marital history, many health crises, and love affairs were the stuff of front page headlines. She was, by any standard, the personification of the larger-than-life celebrity movie star.
A wary approach to hemlock
Today’s story is about a deadly plant or rather, about its moribund etymology. And yet, when you reach the end, the word’s origin may appear somewhat more transparent, even though the plant will remain as deadly as ever.
Moby-Dick and the United States of Aggrievement
Like the white whale itself, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) seems ubiquitous across time. For nearly a century, readers have turned to Captain Ahab’s search for the whale that took his leg to understand American crises. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency offers a different question about Melville, domination, and US political life: How do Americans gain power by claiming that they have been wronged?
Fashion lingo
As a linguist, I understand that language shifts and changes. The voiced z sound of houses is being replaced by an unvoiced s sound. The abbreviation A.I. has become a verb, as in “He A.I.ed it.” Neologisms abound, tracked by the American Dialect Society, and new words often make us think of things in new ways.
Searching DNA databases: cold hits and hot-button issues
Many criminal investigations, including “cold cases,” do not have a suspect but do have DNA evidence. In these cases, a genetic profile can be obtained from the forensic specimens at the crime scene and electronically compared to profiles listed in criminal DNA databases.
Idiomatic pigs and hogs
According to an aphorism by Maxim Gorky, he who was born to crawl won’t fly. This is probably true of most other creatures. For instance, English speakers have great doubts about the ability of pigs to fly.
The end of the “American Century”?
“We Americans are unhappy,” is the opening line in a famous 1941 Life magazine article, in which Henry Luce called for Americans to harness the nation’s ingenuity as a benevolent force in the world. Partly aimed at the nation’s 1930s isolationism, his earnest exhortation to be imaginative and bold also spoke to a moment when decisive action might well turn the tide of war in Europe.
Half a century with OUP: remembering Bill Leuchtenburg (1922-2025)
In 2003, historian William E. Leuchtenburg signed a contract with OUP for a trade book on the executive branch. It was to be 60 to 80,000 words, 200 printed pages, due September 2005. Because he had two other large book projects underway, Bill did not make that date.