Noted music writer Michael Lydon explains how to apply the rule "Let the little come out of the big" to the art of writing.

Several years ago I wrote a short book about guitar playing, Let the Little Come Out of the Big, my approach to the ancient and beautiful instrument.  Continue reading...

In Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer has the back-page essay on the latest in slang dictionaries. You can read it online here, and you can listen to Ben's discussion with Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus in the weekly podcast here. Also check out Ben's Artsbeat blog post on a 1699 slang dictionary.

The US Supreme Court decided last month in the case of Snyder v. Phelps et al, which involved the Westboro Baptist Church and its habit, offensive to nearly all people, of picketing military funerals. The court's decision went in favor of the church and its right to carry on. When we learned that the court had split eight to one, and that the lone dissenter in the case was not one of the court's "liberal" justices but was in fact Justice Samuel Alito, we got all over the text of that decision like a cheap suit.  Continue reading...