Zachary Lesser

Banquo was v good. I liked when they doubled Macduff's Son and Malcolm. Mainly bc editorially there's a real question how Son was got offstage & that's a nice solution, plus the son parallel is interesting. But it's not allowed to produce Macbeth and have just nothing going on with the apparitions!

Just found out about Anna Barbauld's wonderful "Washing Day" which ends with these great Macbeth-inspired lines :

Earth, air, and sky, and ocean hath its bubbles,
And verse is one of them — this most of all.

Otoh my 13yo gave it 3/5 stars and thought the banquet scene was "tuff" so worth the tickets

That was indeed a mediocre production, if we're talking about the same one. I thought Lady Macbeth was good and Banquo's ghost was genuinely creepy. But man did they waste all the good stuff with the witches.

Once again snubbed by the FIFA Peace Prize committee this year.

The central thread here is conspiracy thinking, a diminished form of interpretation that rushes into the vacuum when people lack real interpretive agency. Exercising those muscles of interpreting and navigating complexity is the work that the humanities do from elementary school on up. It matters.

Oscar winning, or at least a BAFTA

part 3 is brilliant, if watched after parts 1 and 2 (which are also good!)

A classic

Sounds like you have checked all the boxes on the classic diorama assignment

Ad on side of bus reads "a flawless semester starts here" Photo shows a group of students, three women, two men, gathered around a laptop. "First Wax Free" (ad is for European Wax Center)

Ad offers an amazing perspective on higher ed

People say this?

Shakespeare in the Kitchen Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us ab...

It’s all happening: Shakespeare in the Kitchen is slated for publication in April 2026 🍽️📗🎉 www.routledge.com/Shakespeare-...

"just" or "also"? I think it's an inside etymology joke

(My eyeball/memory test also would put Doc ahead, but I was on the east coast)

Gooden way ahead of him by the metrics like WAR and JAWS. Like, surprisingly far ahead when I just checked

And now I learn that you have been writing McWhirtles, Curtis!

Yikes! The rules were made up, I believe, by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal, who invented the genre. Don't know about their email. They didn't have email back then.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_...

I appreciate that

*so pleased to SEE his hard work....

Many many congratulations! Wonderful

@pricelab.bsky.social

When Scott Enderle <https://pricelab.sas.upenn.edu/news/jonathan-scott-enderle-1979-2021> and I were building the Shakespeare Census, one of the first things he insisted on was making it open and easily adaptable for others. I'm so pleased to his hard work on that part of the project bearing fruit.

Here's one I once wrote

Higgledy Piggledy
Vladimir Nabokov
Published Lolita to
Scorn from his wife.

Though she was never that
Semiological,
She knew the saying, "Art
Imitates life."

And that you can't use a word that has been used before in a published Double Dactyl

When I learned the rules, it was that that line must be a single double-dactylic word, like "intersubjectively" or "nonpersonality"

Excellent. The maths/sociopaths rhyme justifies the slight violation in stanza 2, line 2.

A very palpable hit

Last winter if you called the jury hotline the night before your scheduled jury duty to see if they really needed you, the recorded voice said, "if your juror number is 100 to 246, you do not need to appear tomorrow. Go birds."

That's the situation we're dealing with here in Philly

Go birds is unique. Go birds