Current national and global events.
This Is Good for the Jews At dusk on Halloween, in the vicinity of 34 years ago, about 1990, my cat B.C. and I happened to be looking out my front window, and she jumped, leaving the window for mid-floor. I saw a young man halfway up the Little Rock apartment’s sidewalk in SS Gestapo […]
Is the Guv Limiting Campus Speech? An Editor’s Note Maybe it’s my middle age or that my decades as an editor have locked in 20th-century grammar, but I have to be overly conscientious to use preferred pronouns in conversation and even email. Confession: I fail at this about 10 percent of the time and have […]
An Editor’s Note Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders last spring signed into law Arkansas Act 542 of 2023, the Given Name Act. Its full title is “An Act to Create the Given Name Act; to Protect Faculty Members, Teachers, and Employees of Public Schools and State-supported Institutions of Higher Education from Compelled Speech; to Prohibit Requiring […]
Editor’s Note — wait, the writer is the editor: Each time I cleaned some syntax, another mass shooting or three were reported, and the shore moved even quicker from my drifting dinghy*. Time for a final update, publish and move on.*“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” — […]
And the dish ran away with the spoon. From the nursery rhyme “Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercis’d in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste.” John Milton, “Areopagitica” (quoted by Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book Club, June 2022) A few years ago […]
When I have taught or trained in editing or writing or somesuch, I always bring out a personal lesson: What is wrong with the headline “Suspect Arrested”? For those who did reasonably well in high school English, you’ll recall having been taught that such sentences or phrases are in the passive voice and that you […]