Not of General Interest

Gwinne and Dame Eleanor have good posts up about time management and schedules and also links to people who write about time management an...

I'm at a conference where I do not know a single solitary soul and where no one knows me. I'm incognito! This has advantages: Fir...

There's an episode of Arrested Development that perfectly encapsulates my experiences with copyedited material.   Michael: Well, ...

If I have to endure one more lecture         Or email         Or posted screed         Or self-righteous comment         Or public o...

In "No, you can't ignore email. It's rude", Adam Grant makes some good points about why you should respond, though. Here a...

Figure 1. Not Walden Pond. Over at Inside Higher Ed, Michael S. Harris has a good essay called " The Zero-Sum Game of Faculty Produ...

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...