English Lessons

It turns out that the phrase “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” did not originate with Gloria Steinem, but rather was inspired by another phrase: a man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle. U2 used the line well once, catching the additional irony of the idea when sung by a man. Yet ... Read More

The military tends to talk in signs and numbers—and, perhaps most famously, in code. The use of abbreviations and alphabetical systems is efficient. In this week’s New Yorker , we learn a little bit more not only about what happened in the last hours of the bin Laden raid, but also about how the ... Read More

Yesterday’s announcement that Robert F. Kennedy’s papers are being reviewed inspired us to revisit one of the former Attorney General’s finest speeches, one we have not written about here before. It was a speech given only three years following the assassination of RFK’s brother, and one given at ... Read More

Ken Auletta’s profile of Sheryl Sandberg in The New Yorker is an excellent companion to Sandberg’s TED speech of last December. The latter was passed like a Dead bootleg among a certain group of women who had made a certain set of choices in their lives, perhaps not unlike the way Gwyneth Paltrow’s ... Read More

And if it’s literature, do we care if it’s violent? “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,” wrote Justice Scalia, in his majority opinion in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. In a footnote, the Justice points out “Reading Dante is unquestionably more culturally and ... Read More

How do we speak and write about things when things are not going the way that we want? Not just little things, like lunch, but big things, like wars. Do we use more rhetoric, or less? Contrasting part of the President’s speech last week on Afghanistan, one that seemed to elicit a Goldilocks response ... Read More

Robert Kaplan’s op-ed on Patrick Leigh Fermor in the New York Times, “The Humanist in the Foxhole,” stands alone as a cool piece of writing worth studying. Kaplan writes: Unlike the young Winston Churchill in Sudan or the Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke journeying through the Ottoman Empire ... Read More

It’s not Dr. Seuss. But Go the F*** to Sleep is extremely powerful, and it’s extremely powerful for an audience who has supported and stomached and loved and memorized-to-the-point-of-loving-slightly-less the canon of (small) children’s literature. After board books, after McSweeney’s Baby Be of Use ... Read More

V.S. Naipaul is without question or controversy one of the finest living writers. Yet the controversy surrounding his recent interview with the Royal Geographic Society, in which he effectively takes down the history of literature written by women with a British public schoolboy’s damning phrase ... Read More

In his book, The Heart and the Fist , former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens writes about the Greek conception of phronesis. A kind of practical wisdom (a poor translation, but the closest), phronesis is a bit like a moral compass; it couples the ability to make choices with the knowledge that those choices ... Read More

No, is the short answer. New forms of writing will bring, as they always have, new ideas and new elements of creative genius. Yet whether length—of a dissertation, a new novel, or the speech you deliver at your best friend’s wedding this weekend—will suffer its traditional relationship to prestige ... Read More

Sam Tanenhaus interviewed Harold Bloom for The New York Times; the video is here. It’s a very cool, very short, interview. It will be historic, too—not only for capturing Bloom at a fragile time in his life, but for capturing him as fierce as ever in his earliest convictions: the canon exists ... Read More

In his interview with BigThink, Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria quotes Lincoln on the relationship between character—moral character—and power. There are many celebrated quotes about character, and Nohria references another one of them, too: that “character is what one exhibits in a crisis ... Read More

“Unless you love, your life will flash by.” These are the last words of the voice-over for Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life trailer. There isn’t much that distinguishes them from others appended to other posters for other movies, except that they carry the literary expectations we have for the person ... Read More

If you love The Economist , you likely know and love its back page, its obituary page. Economist obituaries are models of the magazine's style and, more broadly, models of a traditional English style of reporting, marrying history and literary instincts with factual, objective analysis. The magazine ... Read More