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I’ve always had a sensible chuckle about the goofy “pretty to me”/“city to me” rhyme in Dire Straits’s Tunnel of Love, but now I wonder if he was consciously alluding to Don Juan. And girl, it looks so pretty

Does Arthur Conan Doyle think Sikhs are Muslim? The Sikh characters are named Mahomet, Abdullah and Akbar. I’m guessing this is just the price of living in the pre-Wikipedia world. If you weren’t certain about particular facts, you either h

What if anything has been written about Sherlock Holmes novels as Socratic dialogues? It occurred to me while reading The Sign of Four that Holmes is constantly holding forth on his reasoning process, with his friend characters int

I’m reading The Library of America’s Robert Frost collection. The poetry section is ordered chronologically by publication date of the books the poems were collected in. I just finished A Boy’s Will, which is (as strange as this sounds to

I’m reading Christophe Boltanski’s The Safe House, and I can’t help but relate it to Gene Wolfe’s Peace. Stories of houses built as much from memory and past lives as from physical materials. I’m just a melancholic person, so it’

The naming of Jane Austen novels is always interesting to me. Is she trying to say something by the title, or did she just slap a name on it and call it a day? Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice? Yeah, I get it. Man

It seems to me there are two styles of philosopher: logicians and rhetoricians. We only have one word for it, but are Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche really even doing the same thing? (Yes, I acknowledge that this isn’t a perfect

My wife and I took a date day this weekend including a trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Built along the edge of beautiful Lake Michigan, and designed by renowned architect Santiago Calatrava

I finished Lost in the Cosmos. What a bizarre book. I don’t know if “liked it” is the right description for how I felt. The sense I’m left with is that I will be chewing on it for a long while. I’m certain I’ll read something three years