Not of General Interest

As most of you have probably figured out from all those shout-outs to Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, and the rest, contemporary fiction isn...

Note: Published as a distraction from the unrelentingly grim national news. For thoughtful reflections on those events, see the recent posts...

Hamilton was an exuberant genius who performed at a fiendish pace and must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being ca...

Reason for blog absence: travel and conferences and more travel and more conferences. Paid for by the department or frequent flyer miles a...

How do you project power--not arrogance, but power--through your speech and body language? We've all seen the advice telling us not to...

Two recent articles are making me think about how we conceptualize time as academics. The first is Laura Vanderkam's "The Busy Pe...

From David Brooks's column on Hemingway's house in Cuba , with commentary in italics (I know it's David Brooks, but give it a ch...

What happens every spring? No, not baseball. No, not daffodils, although they happen, too. Spring, and especially the end of the semester,...

Figure 1. Walter White in Breaking Bad ?  At The Chronicle, " Do You Know How Lucky You Are?" asks that very question. (It...

I was blown away by xykademiqz's fabulous post "A Good Little Girl," which I had somehow missed the first time around. Go rea...

Dear Ms. Undine, Why do people like to play April Fool's Day pranks? Especially computer pranks, like Google's failed mic drop ...

When you go to a huge conference that you've never been to before, where your field is only a small part of the conference and there ar...

Some writing inspiration ahead. First of all, Maria Konnikova's "How to Beat Writer's Block" at The New Yorker sums the...

Dear Ms. Undine, Every day on the interwebs, I see new words that no one defines but that everyone seems to understand all of a sudden. ...

The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play, So we sat in the house All that cold, cold wet day. (You know the rest) I've been...

This is going to be short, and it ought to be tagged "I skim read it so you don't have to"or maybe "Tempest in a Teacup ...

Because we all need a little writing inspiration now (you know you do), and you surely want to see what a literary scholar's writing h...

We should designate February the "Dream Big" month. We do this at the beginning of the school year, but maybe now would be a goo...

As one part of my job, I have to deal with Fiendish Counterintuitive Software.  (I figure that every campus has some kind of FCS, so I'm...

 Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties because it's COLD out there today! So remembering the "writing...