Martha recommends The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (Bookshop|Amazon) by Katie Mack, an assistant professor of physics at North Carolina State University. It’s a challenging read, but accessible enough to lay readers to provide...
A retired professor of classics in Missouri suggests the Latin word Utinam! as something to exclaim if you belatedly draw the right tile or card in a game. In Latin, utinam introduces the optative subjunctive and translates as “if only.”...
In a passage from How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Scott Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College, offers an apt description of class letting out and students wandering about while focused on their phones. This is...
In How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Scott Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College, points out that William Shakespeare never had what we might think of as an “English class.” Instead, he was taught...
One secret to writing well is … there is no secret! There’s no substitute for simply sitting down day after day to practice the craft and learn from your mistakes. Plus, childhood mixups around word definitions can lead to some funny stories...
Responding to our conversation about the curses medieval scribes wrote in books to prevent their theft, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst emails a modern-day book curse from the instructional manual Beginning Glassblowing by...