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Dispatch from Oxford on the eve of the OED anniversary

I’m in Oxford, England (as a guest of Oxford University Press, which has covered travel expenses and lodgings) for the 80th anniversary celebration of the Oxford English Dictionary. The festivities begin tomorrow. My previous post about the trip is here. Some Sundays when I was in high school, my dad would drop me off at the UM student library, leaving . . .

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Witches, Demons, & Thieves: A Puritan Halloween

If you’re free on October 22, come out to Housing Works at 7 p.m. for Witches, Demons, and Thieves, a Puritan Halloween celebration with authors Kathleen Kent and Hannah Tinti, and artist Michael Aaron Lee, a friend whose eerie tree paintings (pictured) evoke the cold, dark forest of the soul that Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown finds himself drawn into. As . . .

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