Short Saturday: The Rest of the Story

A little over two years ago I wrote a blog post about a college football star who got a lot of media attention when he was invited to join a book group. It’s a lovely human interest story that I won’t repeat here because you can read it from the link. Additionally, I...

Short Saturday: Give That Kid a Book!

I have said this more than once: I learned a lot from reading books. It led directly to my current vocation, for one thing. But before that, for example, it led to my acquisition of an excellent vocabulary and, I believe, my ability to put that vocabulary to work in a...

Editors as Readers

You will continually be taking chances. There will be readers who want you to kill that ape with the oboe, get the diamonds out of the roast beef, cut ‘myrmecoid’ and ‘sharded.’ (“Don’t say ‘myrmecoid,’ say what it means: ‘antlike.’” I’m not interested in...

Short Saturday: The Dark Side of Being an Author

I’ve experienced my share of online confrontation, some of it mean, some of it downright nasty. And I’ve commented on those experiences too (“Two Kinds of People,” “Prescriptivist or Descriptivist,” and “Haters, Gotta Love ’Em”). This old world is full of blamers,...

If You Stop Learning, You Die

In a recent review of the movie about physicist Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything), I read a line about his first wife, Jane Wilde, who “eventually earned a PhD in medieval Spanish poetry,” and I thought, Whoa. Medieval. Spanish. Poetry? And then I reminded...