Democracy, English, and the wars over usage 21st century Bryan A. Garner Dictionaries E.W. Gilman English language Eric Partridge Errors of usage H.W. (Henry Watson) Fowler Lexicography Philip Babcock ...

When Ann Manov was an undergraduate humanities student at the University of Florida at the beginning of the 2010s, Florida ...

That summer we lived in two houses, one after the other. I had remembered it as two summers, but my brother, Gabriel, reminded me, no, it was all one summer, 1961, when he turned six and I turned ...

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies, by Paul Fischer. Simon and Schuster. 416 pages. $28.99. On the morning of October 14, 1888, Louis Le Prince set ...

May I be forgiven if I take as my text the sixth page of the fourth chapter of The Bonfire of the Vanities? The novel’s main character, Sherman McCoy, is driving over the Triborough Bridge in New York ...

“It may be,” Edmund Wilson wrote in 1929, “that the United States will develop into a great imperialistic power with all its artists, critics, and philosophers as ineffective and as easily ...

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. W. W. Norton. 416 pages. $45. There’s an anecdote that crops up sooner or later in almost any book about Johannes Vermeer. In 1663, a French ...

Liberal internationalism died in the ruins of Gaza and Beirut. Donald Trump’s return to office has only put a tin plate on the coffin. The doctrine lost all legitimacy through its dependence on ...

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a ...

Though I have been hearing (or rather reading) it a lot lately in many venues, it was a little odd — even a bit unsettling — to read it in the New York Times: My favorite part of writing is taking ...

The task of the cervix is to stay closed, to make an impenetrable wall protecting the fetus, for approximately forty weeks of a pregnancy. After that, by means of labor, the wall must somehow become ...

This untitled and undated piece may well be the last complete unpublished short story by Vladimir Nabokov. It was probably written and rough-sanded in the summer of 1926, when Nabokov read the prose ...