A savory Sicilian sausage roll is always a hit for the holidays. This dish goes by a long list of names that are equally delicious to say. Plus, why are those promotional quotes you see on the back of a book called blurbs? The guy who coined the...
In English, someone who’s making a big deal out of nothing is said to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Other languages use different fanciful images to convey the same idea. In Swedish, the image of someone is “making a hen out of...
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
In 1975, Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Amazon|Bookshop). A few years later, she wrote an essay in The New York Times with advice for writers and artists, calling on them to observe...
The winner in the “Vile Puns” category of the 2021 Bulwer-Lytton Contest involves a hoagie shop and a tiny pimento-stuffed object in a long, cheesy sandwich. This is part of a complete episode.
One of the most powerful words you’ll ever hear — and one of the most poignant — isn’t in dictionaries yet. But it probably will be one day. The word is endling, and it means “the last surviving member of a species.” The...