Not of General Interest

So a few days ago I started a post about how for some blessed reason (MLA, or Chicago, or finally getting so bored with this piece that I co...

The 20th anniversary of The Sopranos is everywhere in the news, and HBO has been running a marathon of it, which ended tonight. I’ve been di...

Figure 1. A sunny Chicago in January--who knew? Now it's the moment you've all been waiting for--MLA 2019 in bullet form! The ...

Happy New Year! Wishing you a happy 2019! I feel as though there ought to be a summing up, resolutions, and observations, so here goes. In...

 I've been rereading Ruth Franklin's wonderful bio Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and realized again that we should be re...

To distract from my complete and total lack of writing at a time when I really, really need to (because of deadlines and MLA), I offer up ...

St. Lucy's Day isn't the shortest day of the year any more (because science, and maybe John Donne knew better even back then), bu...

Figure 1. Knickers the cow, the Mona Lisa of internet attention.  Someone on Twitter posted that all the news should just be giant cows...

Figure 1. Jonathan Franzen on Lithub. It's time to check in with our bird-lovin', Oprah-scornin', Edith Wharton-hatin' f...

The brilliant Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me , called it "mansplaining," but there's more to it than that....

When I was out walking yesterday, I saw that our neighborhood's Little Free Library had a sign up that Todd H. Bol, founder of the Lit...

A group of merry pranksters with a mean streak a mile wide and lots and lots of time on their hands perpetrated a hoax recently by submittin...

If you're in an academic department, and especially if you've held any kind of administrative position, you might recognize the trut...

I'm getting ready for something for which have to get the writing done-- have to. I've been paralyzed with anxiety about writing. Wh...

The MLA Job List opens today (September 10) at https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/Job-Information-List . Remember, this isn't the be...

It's been fascinating to see the shift in opinion on Joyce Maynard and her memoir At Home in the World. A few years back, when I was c...

It's fall and time to shed some things, mostly ideas. 1.The idea that computer tech is necessary, as A. O. Scott reminds  in the New...

Dear Ms. Undine, I recently wrote an email to a person in my department, trying to set up a meeting a month from now. This person had he...

Waking up at 4:30 a.m. when the local Starbucks (closest food) does not open until 7:30 a.m. isn't ideal, but it did give me some time t...

The Washington Post r eports that "Leisure reading in the U.S. is at an all-time low," which is one more piece of news that doesn...