Kelly Barnhill is the author of four novels, including The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Bookshop|Amazon), which won the 2017 Newbery Medal for children’s literature. She’s also been helping neighborhood teens with their college essays, encouraging them...
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...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a test of wits that cruciverbalists will love, especially if they’re into cryptic crosswords, those punny, perplexing clues. The classic example is the clue “First place,” which isn’t so vexing if you think about it in...
The wittily named Index, A History of The by Dennis Duncan (Bookshop|Amazon) is a comprehensive and engaging history of that part of books most of us take for granted. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Index, A History of The”...
If you’ve ever sent a really important email and only later caught an embarrassing misspelling right there in the message header, there’s no longer any need to blame yourself. Blame Tutivillis, the medieval demon who introduced errors into writing...
Brian in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, reports hearing an older person talk about getting the receipt for a dish, using the word receipt in the same way that others might use the word recipe. The use of receipt as a synonym for recipe, as in “a set of...

