The standard kilogram is losing mass! A couple of keys weigh less than they used to, or anyhow one key does.

Following up on my earlier post on Nantucket, as well as all the discussion here about Ngrams, I want to offer a few spontaneous speculations based on a new paper that's the talk of at least a couple of neighborhoods in the town.

Yes, Virginia, there can be a point to MLA.

My relationship to poetry took a sharp turn for the worse the day I learned that Emily Dickinson's poetry could be recited to the tune of the "Yellow Rose of Texas."  (This observation is far from original, and there are scores of other tunes that work as well for the Dickinsonian canon for reasons that are well explained elsewhere, but the moment in which this unfortunate coupling occurred to me was nonetheless a shock to my system.)