The new year brings with it wishes for health and happiness. But for many secondary school students, the beginning of the year also brings anxiety about completing college applications, apprehension waiting...
The following text is excerpted from chapter 8 of The Beatles in Context (ed. by Kenneth Womack), ‘Beatlemania,’ by Melissa Davis. Beatlemania: biːt (ə) lˈmeɪnɪə/ From Gr (noun) mania...
What can musical benefits tell us about the ecology of performance in eighteenth-century Britain? Why did musical benefits become such an integral part of a performer’s work in the eighteenth century?...
People who love poetry are not likely to love these sorts of thing: ˌɪntərˈnæʃənəl fəˈnɛtɪk ˈælfəbɪt VP -> t (M) (have + prf) (be + prg) V *h2ner-seerg ...
Why do people adore tiny things? From souvenir keychains to dollhouses, Christmas ornaments to refrigerator magnets, the act of shrinking a life-size thing to a smaller scale has an influential effect....
As an awe-struck adolescent in attendance at the 1962 Pittsburgh Annual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, I saw Bishop Richard R. Wright, Jr., a scholarly protégé of W. E. B. Du Bois....
In a thought-provoking piece in Politico Magazine , Professor Justin Gest proposes a “Moneyball Fix” for America’s immigration system. Taking a page out of sports analytics, he suggests that...
Where do the Iliad and Odyssey come from? The story of these ancient epic poems is a “complicated” one (to borrow Emily Wilson’s inspired translation of the Homeric epithet polytropos, a word that...
We do not yet know whether President Trump’s killing of Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most powerful leader, will prove to be a masterstroke or a disaster. The president’s antipathy toward the Islamic...
Party activism, understood as individuals voluntarily and regularly participating in party-related activities (i.e. not simply for electoral campaigns), seems to be a thing of the past. In the best-case...
I hate movies about Emily Dickinson, and novels. I hate even the idea of the play. I hate impudent rapey poems addressed to Dickinson by entitled male poets. I hate the mugs, pot holders, T-shirts, and...
When I was writing Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature, a book primarily about two writers, the Earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn, back in the 1990s, the opening sentence of the jacket blurb read:...