At first glance, it’s hard to imagine getting into legal hot water for writing and publishing a children’s book promoting healthy habits for children. But that’s what happened to Catherine Pugh, who resigned as mayor of Baltimore in May. Pugh had written a series of Healthy Holly books and had sold them to the Baltimore […]

For many years, we have known that there were three spies at Los Alamos who passed atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets as the bomb was being developed during World War II. They were Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass (the brother of Ethel Rosenburg), and Theodore Hall. Now there is a fourth: Oscar Seborer. His identity […]

The Oxford English Dictionary folks have had their say. Now, it’s the turn for the Merriam-Webster crew to weigh in. The Merriam-Webster Word of the Year for 2019 is they. It reflects a surprising fact: even a basic term—a personal pronoun—can rise to the top of our data. Although our lookups are often driven by […]

If you are not a mathematician, you are unlikely to know about plastic deformation, the Gieringer equations, or slip-line theory. And you have probably never heard of Hilda Gieringer. But if you have ever crossed a bridge, you owe Hilda Gieringer a word of thanks. . . . slip-line theory plays a central role in […]

How can pronouns be controversial? They are, after all, just these little words that substitute for nouns. But in our creative age, we have made even the pronoun political so that today, which pronoun you use, under what circumstances, and to whom or what it refers gives us a clue about your place on somebody’s […]

If you like your crime podcasts fictional rather than true, check out Hunted, starring Parker Posey and produced by Dick Wolf, creator of Law and Order and its progeny. Here’s the description. HUNTED From Legendary producer Dick Wolf comes a new fiction podcast starring Parker Posey about the U.S. Marshals dedicated to capturing the country’s […]