Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been puzzling over metaphors that involve an action performed on a noun. For example, say he’s writing an essay and suddenly gets some new ideas that inspire him. It’s not literally that he was traveling in a...
In 1803, a shy British pharmacist wrote a pamphlet that made him a reluctant celebrity. The reason? He proposed a revolutionary new system for classifying clouds — with Latin names we still use today, like cumulus, cirrus, and stratus. Also: when...
The Public Library: A Photographic Essay (Amazon) is a love letter to America’s libraries and the librarians who open up worlds for readers. It features 150 gorgeous photos by Robert Dawson and essays by famous writers. This is part of a...
In the early 19th Century, a shy British chemist named Luke Howard self-published a pamphlet called Essay on the Modifications of Clouds, which proposed a taxonomy of cloud formations. To his surprise, the pamphlet captured the public imagination...
Inspired by Luke Howard’s groundbreaking Essay on the Modifications of Clouds, the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley penned his poem The Cloud, an example of personification. This is part of a complete episode.
Hey kid, hey kid, give ’em the saliva toss, the perspiration pellet, the damp fling, deluded dip, the good ol’ fashioned spitball! An essay on baseball slang from 1907 sent Martha off on a search for more of these wet ones. This is part...