"Out of hopeful green stuff woven..."

My parents visited a couple of weekends ago, which gave my mother ample time to engage in her usual commentary about Bing and Wesley. To rec...

This is a pretty cool site to visit . You can watch people around the world edit Wikipedia entries in real-time (almost). I find myself usi...

Shannon forwarded me this article about plans to make a movie adaptation of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." I am not sure how ...

"Great beauty, great strength, and great riches are really and truly of no great use; a right heart exceeds all." Benjamin Frankli...

A funny article about how giving students chocolate before they fill out evaluations leads to higher marks for teachers. Check it out. I lo...

"He that does good to another, does good also to himself, not only in the consequences, but in the act; for the consciousness of well-d...

Joe Torre has turned down an offer to return to manage the Yankees next year. I am a bit surprised by this exact turn of events--I didn'...

An interesting article/theory here from author Matthew Pearl, who wrote the popular Dante Club , (I haven't read it, but my friend Rita...

A conversation I have with some of my students every semester: Young female student: "I'm not a feminist or anything, but..." ...

If you don't recognize my paraphrasing of the lines from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's totally amazing musical episode, "Once Mor...

"If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island, cut off from ...

Some of you know that I often make myself stay up in my office working until pretty late in the day. There are plenty of good reasons for th...

Piles of grading in front of me--stacks that will only grow bigger. Numbers to crunch and equations to work out (who said English majors don...

Remember this post from a couple of weeks ago? It would work really well on passiveaggressivenotes.com , a website I've just added to m...

One of my dream road trip destinations is Concord, Massachusetts . Yeah, I know that makes me even more of an English nerd, but let's fa...