by M. W. Penn Last evening we had a dinner party for eight and this evening close friends are coming over to help clear away the leftovers. We often perform this service for each other – falls into the ‘tough job but someone has to do it’ category. Today there is a plethora of fresh [...]

I loved poetry as a child. My father read us picture books written in rhyme; my siblings and I read to each other Hilaire Bellock’s The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and Cautionary Tales for Children; and we studied Struwwelpeter to keep us appalled. But the poetry books I kept coming back to were A.A. [...]

Is this a ‘messy desk’ contest? I may have the winning entry. In truth, I’m not crazy about having a messy desk; it doesn’t quite keep me awake at night, but I’d much prefer an ordered, symmetrically (my math background) organized workspace, files here, references there, phone in the charger where it belongs. Instead, my [...]