CURIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY | Aren’t you curious?

It is that time of the year to be thankful. At Christmas it is time to be merry. At Easter, a time to … well, that depends on your perspective. After all, these are arbitrary dates. Easter moves around every year, so its arbitrariness is self-evident...

Fiber optic Christmas trees have not quite become all the rage, but there is a kind of rich quality to their kitsch-ness that, if only by assonance with Christmas, seems to work.  “At any rate,” your save-the-planet neighbor will officiously muse, “At...

Words are powerful things. There are lots of theories as to why: a brilliant Swiss linguistic theorist named Ferdinand de Saussure suggested that they are significance bearers, and he distinguished between the signifier and thing signified. In as much...

Elaine Jakes always pronounced the word miracle “myuracle.” I’ve rarely heard another person do so, and I honestly can’t recall whether Lizzie Ann Jones Evans (Elaine’s grandmother and my great-grandmother) or Blanche Evans Jakes said “myuracle.” It...