Blogs

I rail against distance learning, laptops in classrooms, PowerPoint, and other trends toward too much technology in university life, yet yesterday I made an audition lecture cd for the Teaching ...

2009 is the centenary of both Malcolm Lowry and James Agee. James Dickey coupled them: [M]y personal heroes of the [totally responsive... intensified] sensibility are John Keats, James Agee, ...

A Letter from Key West To My Friend David, In Memory of his Sister, Eve Sedgwick The southernmost sky is strange at ten at night, Still mildly blue with midday clouds and a ...

This year's winner of the Pritzker architecture prize, Peter Zumthor, has a rare ability to convey in words the spirit of buildings. Even rarer, this spiritual disposition accompanies a ...

Each suicide writes a new life story With obvious portents like something out of Dreiser Or like the junior high school poem Richard Corey, Where, once he's done it, we're so much wiser To the ...

Go wrap Your head in the snowy riversOf the Brooks Range. And that's what Nicholas Hughes did. His father, Ted Hughes, in his bitter poem, "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother," advised ...

Bernard d'Espagnat, a French physicist/philosopher, has won this year's one million dollar Templeton Prize, given to thinkers who attempt to reconcile religious belief and science. d'Espagnat's ...

Rule One: Never make your reader laugh when she's not supposed to. SUNY Binghamton got blasted in the New York Times for running a typically scummy Division I basketball team. Big deal. Tell it to ...

Bernard Madoff is a classic Mafia-style gangster. He comes from gangsters - his mother was a crook. Investigators are looking into his father-in-law. A lot of his friends and investors are crooks. ...

The poet W.D. Snodgrass has died. Here's a poem of his written in the spring but just as right for the beginning of the year. UD interrupts each stanza with a little interpretation. Go here for ...