The “This Week” entry, signed “PS,” in the July 25 TLS identifies Drew Gilpin Faust as a man.

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I feel the following parable has the potential to be misunderstood: let’s say that you see a small spider in your bathroom. You are tired, so you decide to leave it until the morning. Now, imagine that you are not the spider, but a virus infecting a bacterium somewhere in the bowels of its cephalo-thorax. [...]

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I received a letter from one of our insurers recently addressed to That is all for now.

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I applaud the OED lexicographers who cite the recently departed Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration in the entry for “opsimath.” They believe that everything rational must come into being. My own opsimathy will extend to botany, as I have decided that I want to be able to identify every plant species growing in my yard, out [...]

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I’ve been suffering under the delusion for days now that Jackson Browne’s album Lawyers in Love was in fact the soundtrack to the film Legal Eagles, which I think I thought was titled as above. I remember seeing Legal Eagles in the theater, though I don’t think any of us knew that it was a [...]

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I had earlier noted his mordant article on Toynbee, but I just learned from this piece that He enjoyed sending mischievous, pseudonymous letters to newspapers; like the solemn inquiry, published in The New York Review, purporting to come from one “Miss Agnes Trollope” of “Buttocks, near Ambleside,” asking Lawrence Stone for documentary evidence of the [...]

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A footnote in the August 2002 memo attributed to John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee regarding the distinctions between cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and torture and promulgating the interpretation that, according to the prevailing constitutional interpretation, the President in wartime was free to ignore any statutory niceties regarding these distinctions—a footnote in this memo [...]

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