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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 […]
by Anatoly Liberman Many years ago, I participated in a meeting of Russian and British students in a town that was then called Leningrad. In the Soviet Union, everything, from theaters and community centers to parks and streets, was named after Gorky. At a certain moment, one of the British students began to giggle. When […]
Last month, Jill Quadagno was invited to present her take on the US healthcare system, specifically addressing the question ‘why do so many Americans not have healthcare?’, to a group of leading Democratic senators. Prof. Quadagno has graciously allowed us to publish the text of her presentation below. A few years ago my friend Connie’s […]
by Harm de Blij It is noteworthy that the troubling results of the National Geographic Society’s survey of geographic literacy in America were reported in the media during the same week Joseph Biden and Leslie H. Gelb, an unannounced candidate for the presidency and a former staffer of the New York Times, respectively, published their […]
In his 2000 book, Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, which was named one of the 25 Books to Remember by the New York Public Library, Jonathan Petropoulos laid bare the motives of the thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women who went to work for Hitler “repatriating” to Nazi Germany artwork from across […]
Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775); James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1773; ed. F. A. Pottle, 1961) A young and enthusiastic James Boswell befriended Samuel Johnson (1709-84), England’s most famous man of letters, in London in 1763. Soon Boswell was urging […]
Based on the results of a survey released this week by the National Geographic Society, young people in the United States continue to struggle with geography and demonstrate a lack of understanding about our world. The consequences of this deficiency in education are serious when you consider the rising level of interconnectivity between nations and […]
by Anatoly Liberman The terms King’s English ~ Queen’s English are familiar to many. They presuppose that the monarch speaks in a way to be admired and emulated. Language obeys the laws of biology (to the extent that it depends on the production of sounds) and of society (since it is a means of communication) […]