Raritania

You probably noticed it before I did--the vanishing of comment threads from about the web. News sites, Youtube videos--places where you once...

The word "oversensitive" strikes me as one of those about which a person should display some circumspection. The accusation of ove...

It is a standard rhetorical device to quote famous figures. Indeed, teachers of rhetoric in their various forms--forensics, composition, etc...

The words "narcissism," and "narcissist," seems to have been unused until the nineteenth century--the late nineteenth ce...

It has become a commonplace to remark the tendency of our subjection of ourselves to others' narcissism on social media makes people fee...

Not long ago I remarked the way the '90s seemed packed with tabloidish media events that (supposedly) transfixed the nation (when in fac...

I have to admit that I was dubious about the commercial prospects of a Top Gun 2 when I first heard that this project was finally and reall...

An infographic at the Axios news site recently showed that the "number of social media interactions per published article" regard...

Recently writing about the advice "Be yourself" I was told by a reader that quite a few people take the line in Hamlet , "To...

Among those words whose usage has seemed to me sloppy and suspect in a nasty sign-of-the-times way, "self-pity" is right up there ...

This month was the 25th anniversary of the release of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery in theaters . That anniversary hasn't...

Once upon a time I was teaching a survey course on American Literature from the Civil War to today. As part of a "unit" on natural...

Self-publishing is no new practice, but about a decade ago it looked as if the advent of e-book readers, Print-On-Demand services, online bo...

Recently I had occasion to remark how authors' biographical blurbs tend to cut out the less glamorous details of authors' pasts--whi...

It is an oft-heard refrain these days that the results yielded by search engines are ever more worthless--that regardless of whether it is G...