In 1975, Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Amazon|Bookshop). A few years later, she wrote an essay in The New York Times with advice for writers and artists, calling on them to observe...
Is it cheating to say you’ve read a book if you only listened to it on tape? Over the centuries, the way we think about reading has changed a lot. There was a time, for example, when reading silently was considered strange. Plus, what do you...
C-r-r-r-r-reeeeeeeeaaaaaak! Last weekend, we reached into the AWWW vault and pulled out an oldie but goodie, featuring “death eatin’ a cracker walkin’ backwards,” “graveyard shift,” “saved by the...
Greetings! In our latest show, we talk about an expression familiar to many African-Americans but little known outside that community, "I couldn't buy a louse in a wrestling jacket." Also, what does it mean if your dog is...
market for lemons n.— Note: Coined by George Akerlof, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for the paper he wrote that popularized the term. «Indeed, it would seem that a “market for lemons” is rapidly developing in credit...
ambulance chasing n.— «In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call “ambulance chasing.” He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that...
