Remembering 9/11

Nine years ago today I was driving from Houston to College Station when Islamists hijacked four passenger jets in a coordinated attack upon ...

Rosh Hashanah 5771

This is just to wish all my Jewish readers a shanah tovah and to prod my non-Jewish readers into wishing me a happy new year! Talk to you o...

Against creative writing

I have been charged—by whom is irrelevant—with being “against creative writing.” And it is true that I have been hard on creative writing, b...

Functioning data, obsolete media

A dispute with a company that charges an exorbitant fee to replace data on floppy disks that will no longer be accessible by the latest vers...

Tenure

My friend and colleague William Bedford Clark has a delightful poem called “Tenure Deliberations” in his new volume Blue Norther (Texas Rev...

Last days of the academic ruling class

Higher education in America is an economic bubble that’s about to burst, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has been saying all summer. When Br...

Damaged in transit

I have been unpacking my library. Because not all of the bookcases have been built, I have just been getting the books out of their boxes in...