What is it like to have no gift, no gag, no game at all, when your twentieth anniversary comes up … More

The NEH-supported AIDS History Project focuses on how the city of San Francisco experienced and responded to this terrible disease.

An interview in Humanities magazine with scholar Jeffrey Alan Miller, MacArthur “genius” drant winner, and NEH research fellow.

A while back, I spent an incredible day with Judith Dupre, author of an excellent large-scale book about One World … More

Was impressed by this lexicographical memoir by former OED editor John Simpson. I have read enough writing by lexicographers to … More

I have been reading McCarry’s latest, The Mulberry Bush, which made me think I should post my 2009 profile of … More

For several years, I have had a hunger to write this piece about the arrival of the Library of America … More

Women are more correct and more with-it: A piece inspired by reading Matt Gordon’s primer on the work of the … More

My Humanities essay on the rise of cool, the American slang term that took on new life beginning in the … More

I am not an acrostic afficianado, but was delighted to learn there is a type of crossword that is used … More