By David Skinner (A shorter version of this article was published by The Dispatch on July 3, 2025.) When George Clooney … More
Category: Uncategorized
Memoir of a Divorcée
A review of Lyz Lenz’s brief against the American way of wedlock in the Washington Free Beacon.
Goodbye to Spotify
Early last year I initiated a one-man boycott against music streaming. In this article, I stated my reasons.
Linguistics in Court
A reporting essay on the use of dictionaries in court, how they have come up short, and how these failings … More
The State of Parenting
A review of Matt Feeney’s Little Platoons in American Purpose, which is now part of Persuasion, in which I describe … More
Humans of the OED
My review of Sarah Ogilvie’s Dictionary People in Commonweal.
The Late Great P.J. O’Rourke
A review essay about The Funny Stuff, an excellent sampler of O’Rourke’s hilarious and exacting prose style.
American English Anthologized
A review of Ilan Stavans’s The People’s Tongue, a fine and wide-ranging collection of American voices crying out in messy, … More
Why No F-Bomb in Webster’s Third
Editor Philip Gove experienced a great deal of frustration when Webster’s Third was published, but his failure to get fuck … More
Red and Blue Maps Before Red and Blue Maps
Before red and blue became shorthand for conservative and liberal, before the 2000 elections and all that, Ken Martis undertook … More