…  Paul Davis On Crime: Deep Undercover: Former Legendary FBI Undercover Agent Joseph Pistone Introduces Netflix True Crime Series .

…   The Presumption of Innocence: Not Just for the Courtroom | The Libertarian Institute . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) It has great bearing on j...

…  Portraits: No Politics, Just Pictures — Maureen Mullarkey . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…  “Essay on ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ ” | The New Yorker . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

…  Why do we love to quote (and misquote) Albert Einstein? | Aeon Essays . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.) …  consider a statement prominently att...

…  The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel – Brain Pickings . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)  A good way...

…  Seven Books of Poetry and Where to Read Them in Portland's Lents District . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

…  David Mamet's 'Chicago': The 1920s, roaring, with bullets and language flying . …  Knausgaard's 'Winter': Dark ...

…   Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): 18 March 1766 - Tax Repealed . Well, as has been pointed out often, we rebelled against taxation wi...

 The AP Stylebook has Nonprofit while this site has some comments on which: [T}he people at AskOxford, an email interface for addressing...

F rom Pericles to Now - the tribes define their own.   (NOTE THE LINK is to google's links to the article because of the WSJ paywall....

Skijoring in Big Sky, MT 3-17-18

In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. — Stepha...

…  Paul Davis On Crime: The Ugliest Man In Hollywood: On This Day in History Comedian Shemp Howard, One Of the Three Stooges, Was Born .

... Can There Be a ‘Decent’ Left?

…  Zealotry of Guerin: Mount Pinatubo, Sonnet #396 .

…  Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): Colonial America: John Adams, British evacuation, and a question of priorities and loyalties .

…   Superior native reviews “Girl From the North Country” - Perfect Duluth Da y . (Hat tip, dave Lull.)

…   NYLON — The 10 Best Femme-Fronted Bands Changing The Face Of Punk Roc k . My step-granddaughters — Emma and Sophie Hendry — are each i...

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall syst...

…  These Days I Miss John Updike, a Remote and Noble Male Mentor - The New York Times . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) At first Updike bristled at...

... Why intuition is greater than debate

…   Is It Worth 1,000 Words? Mark Sarvas on Writing Art in Fiction | Literary Hub . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) Unlike music, painting gives us s...

…   Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): John Adams . I was at a luncheon for David McCullough when his biography of Adams came out. He spoke ...

One of the year’s most anticipated Broadway plays — the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird...

…  Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): The Scarlet Letter - 16 March 1850 .

…  Paul Davis On Crime: Peace, Love And Homicide: A Look Back At The Unicorn Killer In Philadelphia .

The ways of Providence cannot be reasoned out by the finite mind ... I cannot fathom them, yet seeking to know them is the most satisfying ...

…  Winter’s Immutable Poetics | Review 31 . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) The only artist who ever painted that certain slant of winter light with ...

…  National Book Critics Circle: National Book Critics Circle Announces Winners for 2017 Awards - Critical Mass Blog . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…  Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): “Beware the Ides of March” .

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots. — Rebecca W est, who died on this date in 1983

…   Submissions Open for the 2018 National Book Awards . (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

…   The Music of the Beatles | by Ned Rorem | The New York Review of Books . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) WHY are the Beatles superior? It is easy...

…   The Consciousness Deniers | by Galen Strawson | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) The facts of the Denia...

…  Book/DVD/Record Review | Town Topics . (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.) For dealers and folks who pay $25. Open to public (free) Saturday. Ha...

…   The Ignoble Lie by Patrick J. Deneen | Articles | First Things . …  The ruling class denies that they really are a self-perpetuating el...

…   Up from Orphanism - The Catholic Thing . …  exactly what this pop sociology has to do with Christianity’s greatest prayer is unclear. I...

…   Why Agatha Christie Is Still the Queen of Crime | CrimeReads . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) It is simply clever, this inversion of the cliché...

…   Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): Musings on finite time well-spent doing one thing well .

Happy Pi Day!  (3.14 etc. get it?) Sometime ago I posted about seriousness and unseriousness, and God and Plato and a book by Fr. Schall. ...

…  Remembering Lenny .

…  Q & A with Ann Beattie | Oxford Magazine . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…   Does Recovery Kill Great Writing? - The New York Times . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In a January 2016 question and answer session, Hawking credited “my work and a sense of humor” with keeping him alive. “When I turned 21,...

I have obligations to meet this morning. I will resume blogging this afternoon.

… Professor Stephen Hawking 1942-2018 . … Tribute . … Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) . …    Open Access: Stephen Hawking’s PhD Thesis Go...

When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusu...

…   Episode 260 – Jesse Sheidlower – The Virtual Memories Show . “You don’t need to reinterpret drinks that have been perfect for 80 years....

…   Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): Blogging Note: promises must be honored .

…  Chicago’s Particular Cultural Scene and the Radical Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks | The New Yorker . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

…  Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): Hawthorne and Melville -- changing directions .

…  The Other O’Connor | National Review . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) In  The Living Novel , V. S. Pritchett praised those novelists “who are no...

…  Leningrad's Lost Photographer . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

…  Humanities | Special Issue : Beat Generation Writers as Readers of World Literature . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to lie in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider tha...

…  To the Future Readers of Lucie Brock-Broido . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) See also: T he Enchanting Poems of Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018), ...

…  Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): The Moneylender of Toulouse (2008) .

My interview with the Seattle-based poet, Frances McCue, has been published in the most recent edition of Rain Taxi . We discuss a range of...

I have some errands to run. I will do some more blogging when I return.

…   Egyptian prosecutors seek death sentence for photographer | RSF . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

…  Jimmy is everywhere | Opening the FBI file on James Baldwin . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

…  All-female shortlist for €10,000 Moth Poetry Prize . (Hat tip, G.E. Reutter.)

…  A luftmensch in search of the perfect conversation: NYPL’s “curator of public curiosity” | The Book Haven . “‘I’m the curator of publ...

…  Peter Temple: tributes paid to acclaimed crime writer after his death, aged 71 | Books | The Guardian . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry. — Georg...

…  There Is No Case for the Humanities - The Chronicle of Higher Education . The humanities do not need to make a case within the universit...

…   Mozart’s Diary Where He Composed His Final Masterpieces Is Now Digitized and Available Online | Open Culture . (Ht tip, Rus Bowden.) … ...

…  The X Files: Elizabeth Acevedo and the Poetry of Young Identity | Village Voice . (Hat tip, G. E. Reutter. The Poet X  is Acevedo’s firs...

(Hat tip, G. E. Reutter.)

…  Winning Poems for 2018 January : IBPC . … The Judge's Page . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

…   Roman Military Commander's Sprawling Home Found Beneath Subway System .

…   John Gray - Mind the Gap | Literary Review | Issue 462 . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) We have been taught to think that our distinctively huma...

…  The University Bookman: Who Is Blackford Oakes?  (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…  Teen waitress who cut diner's food for him wins scholarship [Video] .

The title is taken from a line in Robert Browning's Poem "Pauline" — " "Sun-treader, life and light be thine forve...

…   Humanities | Special Issue : Geographies of the Beat Generation . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

…  A Starkly Beautiful Film About Bach, Through the Lens of His Wife’s Diary . (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Her new collection of essays, What Are We Doing Here?

…  Lauran Paine – Zenith City Online . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…   Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): Image Magazine 100 Writers of Faith . The word commonly translated as faith  in the Gospels is    ...

…  Paul Davis On Crime: A New Crime Novel On Mickey Spillane's 100th Birthday .  I missed this yesterday, which was, of course, the ann...

…   Zealotry of Guerin: Eros (Paul Klee), Sonnet #395 .

…   Middlemarch Thoughts | Time's Flow Stemmed . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I am reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung.  The last time I read it was in high school XX years ago, when the 60's still ...

EVERY SO OFTEN, I like to skip through web sites and just read, one linking to another, almost effortlessly learning about one thing, then a...

Spooky Sky Objects appear; outrace F/18’s - why doesn’t the Pentagon care?

I don't think my position unusual for a woman. I'm following a perfectly natural urge to do what I like. — Clare Booth Luce , bor...

I've written on the blog before about how, in the hands of untrained historians, topics of historical interest can quickly be trans...