Jack the Wonderful Williamson, Part 5: Blanche
Jack Williamson, of course, had become a civilian again along with all the rest of us. His plan was to go back to the college education he had been forced to abandon long before because he didn’t have...
View ArticleEarly Days at Brooklyn Tech
By Frederik Pohl (’09) In the spring of 1932, when I was 12 years old, my homeroom teacher explained to us that as we were going to start high school as soon as we came back from summer vacation, we...
View ArticleEarly Days at Brooklyn Tech, Part 2
In New York City, the school year, up through the end of high school, came in two parts, fall term and spring term. I had entered Brooklyn Tech in September 1932 — fall term — which would end in...
View ArticleEarly Days at Brooklyn Tech, Part 3
The fall term of the year 1934: For all of us Techies, it was a watershed event in at least two ways. First there was the sybaritic opulence of our new home. Everything was so clean! Not only that, the...
View ArticleMy Life as Book Editor for Popular Science
After the war — that’s World War II, I’m talking about, what did you think? — I went to work as copywriter for a tiny Mad Ave. advertising agency called Thwing & Altman. It wasn’t a boring job, and...
View ArticleBlog Helper-Out Gets Degree
Cathy Pizarro, Betty’s oldest daughter, who helps Betty and me deal with computer malfunctions and much else, came back to live with us years ago after her husband, Tony Pizarro, was hit and killed by...
View ArticleArrival, Part 3: KC in the GOP’s Wake
By the time the dozen or so of us hungry MidAmeriCon-goers got desperate about food we learned that the Kansas City Rot had spread through the whole city. The hotel’s own coffee shop would take no...
View ArticleWhat We Learn in Economics
According to the economist Allen R. Sanderson, writing in Chicago Life, about 40 percent of college graduates have taken at least one economics course and 5 percent have majored in it. Good news, you...
View ArticleStumbling Blocks to Persuasive Writing
By Elizabeth Anne Hull An important shibboleth of literacy when I was much younger was whether people could properly use, spell, and punctuate the common words to, two, and too. Likewise there, their...
View ArticleThrough the Harmonic Convergence, Part 3
He was English, the fellow in the lobby. He had come from London the day before to see some kindred enlightened souls in Cincinnati, Ohio. Now he was on his way to certain other centers of adepts...
View ArticleThe Future of Pronouns
By Elizabeth Anne Hull According to AAUW, since the 1990s, a hot topic in the field of college-level feminist/gender studies is dealing with gender-specific pronouns when discussing unknown persons....
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