In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Blind Assassin, when young Claire Chase asks questions about her mother’s miscarriage – “How could anything so little hurt Mama?”…
In the poem Comus, John Milton asks, “Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud / turn forth her silver lining on the night?” He…
This bit of machismo wisdom originated with Nietzsche, who was a professional scoffer. His book, Twilight of the Idols (1888), subtitled How to Philosophize with…
Dubious Maxim 1: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. This expression may have originated in falconry, a sport that never…
Now that network television has all but disappeared from our everyday consciousness, it’s difficult to convey how central it once was to how we viewed…
In February 1835, Phineas T. Barnum launched his career as a showman by purchasing a female slave, Joice Heth, from R.W. Lindsay, a Kentucky side-show…