In 1998, when my husband announced that he'd been invited to Oxford University for a year, I made an announcement of my own. I was having a mid-life crisis, thank you very much. Therefore, I wished to stay in Arizona and write fiction.

Unlike most normal red-blooded American women of a certain age, I hate to travel, unless it's to a familiar place, to see people I already know. For me, travel is an opportunity to be reacquainted with my dearest anxieties: flying, packing, shipwreck, public toilets, nameless indigenous insects and being stranded without lunch by the thief in the American Express commercial.

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What role do blogs play in the classroom? How do they change learning? A teacher -- and blogger -- tackles this question on his education-focused website Borderland. He writes: "Education bloggers understand that the deployment of new publishing tools in classrooms unhinges learning from the frame of the traditional classroom. When students change from recipients of information to active participants in knowledge exchange and construction, their roles as learners are redefined. The definition of classroom is opened for debate." Read the entire entry here.

We asked Katie Raynolds, the amazing high school student we interviewed about words, language and books, to recommend her favorite reads to fellow students. Here's what she wrote:

I love anything by Ray Bradbury, like Fahrenheit 451, and especially his short story anthology The Illustrated Man. I also recommend Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, which has a lot adventure and not too many crazy words that others may struggle with. I admit, many of the books I read would not suit boy readers, but they're still good! An example would be Stargirl. This book may be better for girls, and it's a little better suited for girls that are younger than I, but it changed my life. Holes is also a really, really good book -- the author ties every detail to another plot point, and it's incredibly smart. And of course, there are the popular Harry Potter books and the Lord of the Rings series, which are an acquired taste but are, in the end, a joy to read. I know that some of these titles are obvious suggestions, but they're great, great books!!!

When we ran a post called "Short Words Are Best" a few weeks ago, subscribers jammed our Inbox with comments. One in particular caught our attention:

"Sure, short words are more readable, but what about the joy that comes from solving the innermost puzzle of a long word? For a linguaphile like me, the purest ecstasy arises from finding the Latin or Greek roots in a word, putting them together, and discovering the story of a word. For example, the word "peninsula" comes from "paene" and "insula," which mean "almost" and "island," respectively. So the word peninsula literally means "almost island." Sure, it's a long word, and some students may not like to read it, but the pleasure of the shape of the word and the story of its creation makes reading it worth the while."

We appreciated this spirited defense of long words, plus we noticed the word "students" in the comment. So we emailed this person, a teacher obviously, to find out more about how she teaches language. Well, maybe not so obvious. Here was the reply:

"You just made my day! I'm no English teacher -- I'm a high school freshman!"

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Los Angeles teacher Linda Slater wrote us to say, "Did you know that Bob Sipchen, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the LA Times now has a powerful blog all about the public school system in Los Angeles?" Thanks for the heads up, Linda, we didn't know. But when we checked out School Me, we thought it would be useful to any teacher, in Los Angeles, or beyond. We encourage you to check it out, too: School Me

As the executive editor of the award-winning magazine Saveur and author of the soon-to-be-released W. W. Norton book Cradle of Flavor, on the cooking of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, James Oseland is celebrated for his writing about food -- just don't call him a "food writer." We caught up with James to ask him to parse this distinction, and tell us what makes for compelling writing on the subject of food:

VT: Is there such a thing as "food writing?"

James: We have a tendency to categorize in our culture, so we think of "food writing" as a thing, "science writing" as a thing, the work of a novelist as a thing. But good writing is good writing. It's essentially all the same thing, you know what I'm saying?

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A List Apart, a terrific site that "explores the design, development and meaning of web content" argued the case for web storytelling last August. Author Curtis Cloninger writes, "Much ink has been spilt lately bemoaning the lack of quality content on the web. 'Sure the site flashes and whizzes and startles, but what does it have to say?'" Read the entire entry here.