We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don’t evidently realize that there are fundamentals.
We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don’t evidently realize that there are fundamentals. Many people—people who make...
In ways that we have barely begun to understand, trillions upon trillions of reflexive chemical reactions add up to a mobile, thinking, decision-making you—or, come to that, a rather less reflective b...
We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At
So it needs to be said that nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment—actually all of it, every bit—involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. Shakespeare never owned a bo...
To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s prob...
In Anglo-Saxon times, according to Crippen, it was customary for someone offering a drink to say, Wassail! and for the recipient to respond Drinkhail! and for the participants to repeat the exercise u...
Shenandoah National Park is lovely. It is possibly the most wonderful national park I have ever been in, and, considering the impossible and conflicting demands put on it, it is extremely well run. Al...
Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post. These
Shakespeare, it appears, was caught up in the affair because he had been a lodger in Mountjoy’s house in Cripplegate in 1604 when the dispute arose.
Travelling faster than a bullet, an incoming meteor would be moving much too swiftly to be seen, much less to provoke alarm. (Credit
Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the...
Seven
Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the oc...
And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to g...
And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number,...
To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s ap...
So I decided to do it [hike the Appalachian Trail]. More rashly, I announced my intention - told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew...
Skull of an early modern human, dating from 90,000 years ago, found at Qafzeh in Israel. Found at the same site were remains of Neandertals, suggesting that here at least the two species coexisted, po...
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
Showing 741 to 760 of 1557 results