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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
by Anatoly Liberman Alex, a fifth-grader and so far the youngest reader of this blog, wants to know how to start investigating one’s family name. This question interests many people who study their genealogy. (Pay attention to the spelling: in American English, genealogy rhymes with geology, biology, and philology, but its root is Latin genea […]
Continued from last week’s post: Boswell: Monday, 30 August 1773 Boswell: Wednesday, 1 September We came to a rich green valley, comparatively speaking, and stopped at Auchnashiel, a kind of rural village, a number of cottages being built together, as we saw all along in the Highlands. We passed many many miles today without seeing […]
Allen Barra, author most recently of a biography of Paul “Bear” Bryant, interviewed Steven Lubet for the American Heritage blog. In the interview, Lubet discusses some of the great poker players, writers, and trial lawyers that influenced the lessons in his book. Michael Webster continues his discussion of Lawyers’ Poker with a positive review on […]
by Anatoly Liberman In dealing with a category like time, we have every reason to suppose that in the past the word for it designated something more concrete, for instance, a measurable interval or an observable event. What interval, what event? Scholars facing such questions look for words whose meaning is similar to the one […]
By Steven Lubet I recently got an email from Michael Webster, a commercial litigator in Toronto, who kindly said that he found my “trial examples interesting and useful examples of trial advocacy.” Then he continued: However, I disagree with the analogy between slow playing at poker and skillful advocacy. Slow play at poker is generally […]
By Rachel Bronson The United States and Saudi Arabia form one of the world’s most misunderstood partnerships. The Saudis are a longtime oil supplier for the U.S. economy but on 9/11 their kingdom accounted for 15 of the 19 hijackers. The Bush family and the House of Saud are close yet Secretary of State Condoleezza […]
by Jerry Menikoff The recent front-page story told of a tantalizing possibility: although almost all women with breast cancer are now advised to get treated with chemotherapy, in the future more than two-thirds of them may be able to avoid that treatment. However, as the New York Times reported, the evidence supporting this change is […]
Continued from last week’s post: Johnson: ‘Loch Ness’ Boswell: Monday, 30 August 1773 This day we were to begin our equitation, as I said, for I would needs make a word too. We might have taken a chaise to Fort Augustus. But we could not find horses after Inverness, so we resolved to begin here […]
A whirlwind week of prepping is over and BEA is finally here! So, we’re taking a blogging mini-break and just providing some links today. Here is the Washington Post’s BEA preview and and the AP’s which focusses on the politics of publishing’s schmoozefest. Here is today’s NYTimes review of The Da Vinci Code, which devotes […]
by Anatoly Liberman Language changes because so many people speak it and because even today it is impossible to control the norm. A community of English professors left on a desert island and allowed to breed would probably have preserved their sounds, forms, and vocabulary intact for a million years (if this group survived the […]
by Bart Ehrman The Da Vinci Code is a murder mystery set in modern times, but its intrigue for many people has been its historical claims about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. I won’t summarize the entire plot here, as it is familiar to nearly everyone—there are only six people in the English-speaking world who have […]
Stanley Kunitz was the oldest living poet included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. [He is also, sadly, the second poet to have passed since the book appeared. Barbara Guest died earlier this year.] We will miss him, but the knowledge of a long life lived well is a strong consolation. Stanley’s poetry has […]
Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard. During World War II he served in the Air Transport Command of the U.S. Army. He taught for many years at Columbia University, where his students revered him. As judge of the Yale Younger Poets series he chose the first books of Robert Hass […]
by Susan Blackmore Charles Darwin’s basic insight was so simple and yet so powerful that it has been called “the best idea anybody ever had” – and I agree. Most people are familiar with the idea of evolution by natural selection as applied in biology, but part of the power of Darwin’s wonderful idea is […]
Continued from last week’s post: Johnson: ‘Inverness’ Johnson: ‘Loch Ness’ Near the way, by the water side, we espied a cottage. This was the first Highland hut that I had seen; and as our business was with life and manners, we were willing to visit it. To enter a habitation without leave seems to be […]
by Saul Cornell Mayor Bloomberg’s recent summit on gun violence has revived an issue that many pundits and political soothsayers have written off as moribund. Few issues in American public life are more controversial than guns. Yet, even among hot button issues in American public life there is something perverse about the dynamics of the […]