Wes Phillips

Linguist John McWhorter casts a kindly eye on quotation marks conveying emphasis. Fine, but when he defends "impact" used as a verb, I suggest he goes too far. "Quite simply, the verbs view, silence, worship, copy, and outlaw all began as nouns. No one has a problem with them."

Huckleberry thinks I don't have sufficient respect for nap time.

Bagheera thinks the space between the preamp and the upper shelf is exactly cat-sized.

Stevie Nicks would like her forties back. "'It was eight completely wasted years of my life.' Here's the irony, she says: the 'powers that be' had sent her to the psychiatrist in order to keep her working, but the 'treatment' he gave her made work almost impossible. 'It's very Shakespearean. It's very much a tragedy.'"

Universe Today has posted a photo of a pulsar eating a star. Well, I'd never seen that before.

Growing up in the shadow of Monticello, I was raised on tales of Jefferson's taste for wine—after all, the estate had its own vineyards, distillery, and acres of crocuses for saffron. What had us all buzzing were the acres of hemp—local heads maintained that TJ never missed a hemp harvest. Right.

Euan Ferguson took the Tube last week. "Only three stops on the Piccadilly line between Knightsbridge and the centre of town, and I would have got there more quickly, pleasantly, and safely by crawling backwards through the linking sewers with a twitching rat in my mouth and open bleeding weals on my bare backside."