On March 14, or 3/14, fans of both dessert and decimals come together to celebrate Pi Day. This year, though, it’s not enough to call it at 3/14, because it’s 3/14/15, and at 9:26 and 53 seconds, the first ten digits of pi will all be...
Writers and where they do their best creative work. A new book on Geoffrey Chaucer describes the dark, cramped, smelly room where he wrote his early work. Which raises the question: What kind of space do you need to produce your best writing...
The new book Chaucer’s Tale by Paul Strohm describes the cramped, noisy, smelly place in which Chaucer wrote, which got us thinking about the particular environmental preferences we all have for getting serious writing done. This is part of a...
An Upper Michigan listener with a form of dyslexia told us he wrote to Kurt Vonnegut years ago about his frustration with trying to become a published writer. Vonnegut wrote back, assuring that when you care enough about your subject, the right...
Is there a word you keep having to look up in the dictionary, no matter how many times you’ve looked it up before? Maybe it’s time for a mnemonic device. And: a listener shares a letter from Kurt Vonnegut himself, with some reassuring...
There’s a new kind of hamburger menu that involves pixels, not pickles. It’s that little stack of horizontal lines in the corner of a webpage that you click to see more options. You might use a hamburger menu while webrooming–that...