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Plutarch, To an Uneducated Ruler 2 = Moralia 780 B (tr. Harold North Fowler): For one who is falling cannot hold others up, nor can one who is ignorant teach, nor the uncultivated impart culture, …

Cover of “Captain” Mayne Reid’s The Headless Horseman With the arrival of spring break, I’ve managed to find time for a little light reading—purely for the sake of entertainment, no edifying strings attached. This is …

Grinding away at Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), a genuine monster. “As I was saying it is often irritating to listen to the repeating they are doing, always then that one has it …

Nekrasov’s poem “The Green Noise” (Зеленый шум, 1862–63) takes us inside the perspective of a peasant man who decides to kill his wife. She voluntarily tells him—he wishes she hadn’t—about something that happened to her …

In 1942, the literary critic and Princeton graduate, Edmund Wilson, then forty-seven, made friends with a scholar of Russian literature slightly younger than himself, Helen Muchnic. Born in Baku in 1902, Helen emigrated to the …

At dusk I am standing in front of the Staatsbibliothek with two large bags of loan books on my shoulders. I’m looking on my mobile which bus comes first. I hear a shy voice behind …

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From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. xxv-xxvii: The celebrated words from The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, that form the epigraph to this …

As many of you know, my big project during the winter and spring a year ago was a group of twenty charcoal landscape drawings. They eventually formed the core of my book Snowy Fields, along …

This is not my usual ALA report because the Council meetings at LibLearnX were brief and I was occupied with some legislation I’d been working on. Here are some important notes for those who are …

 For those not subscribed to the FIT File (it’s free!) via your regular podcast app or on YouTube, here’s a quick post with the highlights from the most recent episode. In this episode, we …

Hi from Scotland!We’re here on the beautiful Dunton Kilchoan Estate in the Scottish Highlands with the iPhone 14 Pro cameras — we’ve been hiking, biking, and boating all around the area, pushing these new cameras …

This May there are more than eight dozen calls for submissions. All of these are paying markets, and none charge submission fees. As always, every genre, style, and form is wanted, from short stories to …

It is now approximately 2.5 months since Gaz and I mutually agreed our relationship was no longer viable as it was, and just over a month since he moved out. I found the first few …

After seeing the video for “Actor Out of Work” by St Vincent, and especially after the performance on Austin City Limits, I was blown away. It felt like the first genuinely new music I’d heard …