The artists at Walt Disney Studios considered a long list of possible characters before settling upon the final seven dwarves in the Snow White movie. Also-rans included Nifty, Dirty, Goopy, Wheezy, and Chesty. Quiz Guy John Chaneski has created a...
The novels Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright and A Void by Georges Perec are examples of constrained writing or lipograms. Lipogrammatic writing is composed entirely with words that don’t contain a particular letter, such as, in this case, the...
The anatomy of effective prose, and the poetry of anatomy. Ever wonder what it’d be like to audit a class taught by a famous writer? A graduate student’s essay offers a taste of a semester studying with author Annie Dillard. Also, what...
How is a popular tune like a butterfly? Quiz Guy John Chaneski says the answer to this riddle involves an adjective ending in the letter Y. So do all the other answers in this week’s puzzle. This is part of a complete episode.
There are scores of new television shows out there, which inspired Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle based on names of TV programs you may not have heard of. For example, is Cloak and Dagger a series about spies in the 1940s, or is it about two...
Ever notice how many comic-book villains have names ending in the letter O? For starters, there’s Magneto, Sinestro, and Bizarro. Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle features new villains with names that are common words ending in -o. For...