Over the course of my career, I've increasingly noticed people caring about something called "impact factors" and "citation analytics."  This isn't so prevalent in my field, at least in part because...

Just a few.

A collection of snippets of early reviews of each of Marilynne Robinson's four novels--Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila.  Funny; I had never noticed that each of them is a single...

This is a nice piece on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (the TLL), which is aiming to be a truly comprehensive research project, mapping the semantics of the entire Latin language from its earliest...

Sorry for being out of touch.  End of teaching! Finals time! A bit crazy-making. If you're an academic, you know whereof I speak.

Are philosophical "intuitions" innate?  For the past...

If you braid them, they make a circle!  Maybe.  Metaphorically braid, and metaphorical circle. Whatever.

If you've never yet heard David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" commencement...

A brief post:

Not sure I buy this totally, but it's worth considering:

In the late 20th century, economics established itself firmly as the queen of the policy-making sciences. Up until...

A raw, cold day!  Brrrrr. But now I'm sitting by the fire, warming myself with the happiness that comes with sharing these links with you.  

Practicing gratitude is an important skill, and...

Here is a piece that contrasts the style (micro and macro) of traditional "big books" like Zadie Smith's work, with the new move to "autofiction" and memoir-like genres, like Knausgaard's My...

Small stuff just for a quiet Sunday evening.

There was a "Mutual Admiration Society" of women writers at Oxford in the 1910s and 1920s.  Dorothy Sayers was one of them, and they...

Hannah Arendt on W.H. Auden in The New Yorker, a piece that's begun to recirculate on the interwebs:

In the forties, there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very...