Susan La Flesche Picotte

The First Native American to Receive a Medical Degree

Susan LaFlesche Picotte was first Native American to be licensed to practice medicine in the U.S. She opened her own hospital, but didn't live to run it.
paragraph book

What a Paragraph Is

On the controversial directive that a paragraph must contain a topic sentence, an idea that theorists, writers, and students have questioned for decades.
Congress internet facebook

What Congress Should Know About the Internet

Facebook's privacy and ad preferences settings are a privacy placebo: they trick us into feeling a little better, but they don't treat the underlying disease.
Woman using computer in the 1970s

Better Writing Begins with the Right Tools

Word processing software has not only changed the way we write; it's changed the way we read. It pays to think about what we want from our writing tools.
library stacks

6 Tips about Academic Writing for #AcWriMo

November is Academic Writing Month. We’ve gathered six helpful tips for your scholarly writing—with academic citations of course.
Unabomber words

Fighting Words With the Unabomber

Some of the world's most baffling criminal cases were solved thanks to some seemingly harmless point about language. Take the Unabomber, for example.
Dr. Evil

Very British Villains (and Other Anglo-Saxon Attitudes to Accents)

What do peoples' accents really reveal about them? The villainous British accent crystallizes the love-hate special relationship between the US and the UK.
Charlotte's Web

“What’s a life, anyway?” Remembering E. B. White

Reading Charlotte’s Web is the first time many bookworms feel real sadness for pretend characters.
Travel

The End of the Tour: Why Do We Travel?

Travel is commodity, a privilege, and a state of mind; a comfort to some and a trial to others. 
Album cover in handmade paper (from the Heavy Rotation Series), 2015 Krista Franklin

Afrofuturist Artist Krista Franklin

Visual artist Krista Franklin uses various media to create fantastic new worlds inspired by science fiction, the Black Arts Movement, and Afrofuturism.