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Donald Hall is a wonderful choice for US Poet Laureate. I’ve worked closely with him on such projects as “The Best American Poetry 1989,” and in 1994 he asked me to succeed him as general editor of the University of Michigan Press’s “Poets on Poetry” series. So I feel a special kinship with him. But […]
By Glenn W. LaFantasie Near the High Water Mark on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, a massive white building shaped like a drum sits flat on the eastern slope of the ridge, obscured partially by a grove of fruit trees. Almost exactly in the center of the lines that Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of […]
Donald Hall (b. 1928) was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended Phillips Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford. A friend of George Plimpton, founding editor of the Paris Review, he was the magazine’s first poetry editor (1953–1962), choosing the poems appearing in its pages and conducting interviews with such eminences as Ezra Pound and T. S. […]
By Anatoly Liberman It does not surprise us that naked and wretched do not rhyme with raked and etched. But the difference between learned in I have learned a lot in this course and I have seldom met such a learned man is disturbing. In native words and in many borrowings, English has lost most […]
By Steven Lubet As reported by Adam Liptak in the New York Times (June 9, 2006), a federal judge in Florida has ordered two lawyers to “convene at a neutral site” and “engage in one (1) game of rock, paper, scissors” to settle a trivial dispute about the site for taking a deposition. Calling it […]
By William N. Eskridge, Jr. and Darren R. Spedale Last week, the Senate debated the Marriage Protection Amendment (MPA), which failed to achieve the two-thirds vote needed to amend the U.S. Constitution. If ratified, the MPA would have added language to the Constitution defining marriage as “the union of a man and a woman” and […]
Continued from last week’s post: Boswell: Thursday, 2 September Johnson: Edinburgh We now returned to Edinburgh, where I passed some days with men of learning, whose names want no advancement from my commemoration, or with women of elegance, which perhaps disclaims a pedant’s praise. The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to […]
by Anatoly Liberman If we disregard the use of runes, we may say that literacy came to Europe with Christianity. Two exceptions are Greece and Italy. England, like its neighbors, adopted the Roman script, but the sounds of the Germanic languages (and English belongs to the Germanic group of the Indo-European family) were in many […]
Darren Spedale and William Eskridge have been all over the media this week responding to the renewed push by President Bush and Senate Republicans for a Gay Marriage Amendment. Time.com blogger, Andrew Sullivan, made this quote from their new book (via an excerpt at the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy website) his ‘quote of […]
By Steven Lubet The issue of judicial pay is back in the news, prompted by the recent resignation of federal appellate judge Michael Luttig, who left the bench to take a position as general counsel of Boeing. A very highly regarded jurist (he was widely thought to have been on the short list for the […]
Continued from last week’s post: Boswell: Wednesday, 1 September Boswell: Thursday, 2 September. I had slept ill. Mr Johnson’s anger had affected me much. I considered that, without any bad intention, I might suddenly forfeit his friendship. I was impatient to see him this morning. I told him how uneasy he had made me by […]
By Jussi M. Hanhimäki American media has been exercised in the last week over “newly released” documents from Henry Kissinger’s archives that reveal his position on Vietnam. Specifically, reports have appeared on NBC news and on the pages of The New York Times about how Henry Kissinger told Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai in 1972 that […]
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 […]