Essays

“As long as a piece of string.” That was my English teacher’s answer when a student asked how long an essay had to be.

I grew up hearing Boudreaux jokes—usually from Uncle Bubba or my pawpaw, who’d been waiting all evening for someone to give him an opening. If you’re not from Southeast Louisiana, you might mistake them for Cajun versions of the

My great-grandmother, Granny-Great, had a poem she loved to recite. It wasn’t a lecture; it was only four lines. There was an owl lived in an oak. The more he heard, the less he spoke. The less he spoke,

Ostensibly, Mark Twain once said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. He had a good publicist. Being friends with a writer is a dicey proposition. Sooner or later, you’

We humans are pretty proud of our intelligence. We’ve built skyscrapers, landed on the moon, mapped the human genome, and carry more computing power in our pockets than NASA had during Apollo. And yet, sometimes we’re not so different from

I've been thinking about a number lately. 42. If you've read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you know it. A supercomputer called Deep Thought spends 7.5 million years calculating the Answer to the Ultimate