Cheap child’s toy/ incompetent user/ pilot error—tangled and hanging / Sway, spin, climb, and fall on its ladder its helix of string / Pleuston (meaning dwelling on the surface) / (meaning sail meaning float)
Periodical cicadas do not rely on camouflage to survive. They overwhelm their predators with numbers, billions of them crawling out of dime-size holes in the ground, an evolutionary strategy known among biologists as “predator satiation.”
The first time I escaped a language was in spring 1983. I was nine years old and living with my family in Barcelona, the city where I was born. My parents had just been informed that all my classes the following school year would be taught...
And then they started fighting about what the gravestone would say. Noam’s dad wanted “Son, something, and friend, plucked in the prime of his life.” He didn’t know what the “something” would be yet, just that there had to be three things...
Over the course of thirty-six hours, my daughter and I rode with Mr. Toad into the depths of hell, squinted at a bonfire of sewing spindles, choked on hairspray, broke the fourth wall at least fifteen times, smiled at a thousand strangers...
In 1904, University of Virginia President Edwin A. Alderman cooked up the idea of starting a magazine whose mission would be guided by new books and the inquiries they provoked about the world of literature and the world at large. Though...
