Passionate, intense, fearless … this essay on the history of book blurbs will have you positively clawing yourself with pleasure. We’ve blurbed about blurbs a couple of times here at The Millions.
Deft, Masterful
Making the Puzzle More Hip
Meet the 23-year-old who’s been tasked with “injecting some swag” into the “traditionally conservative New York Times [crossword] puzzle.”
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Positively Freudian
Chances are that your mental image of Pavlov is that of a man giving commands to a barking dog. However, as a new biography makes clear, the doctor who brought us his very own adjective has a far more complicated legacy. In The New Yorker, Michael Specter writes about the man behind the bell.
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Connecting the Dots
How did commas, colons, dashes, and question marks come into existence? Keith Houston writes for BBC about the history of punctuation.
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A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left
“She loved that I had to kiss her goodbye 16 times or 24 times if it was Wednesday.” In poet Neil Hilborn’s slam poem “OCD,” he discusses what it’s like for a person with obsessive compulsive disorder to fall in love and incorporates his tics in the performance.
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