Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnuts are wonderful when hot: pillowy, ethereal, seemingly insubstantial. Much of the country, however, knows “fresh” Krispy Kreme as the glass case in gas stations or in grocery store packages. While I cannot support the packages—the goodness is lost more than two days out—the relatively “fresh” doughnuts and day-old leftovers are [...]

Some people are finders. My good friend Rob Stilling has a genius for finding. His most recent effort: a lost Robert Frost poem called “War Thoughts at Home” that is published this month in the fall issue of VQR, The Virginia Quarterly Review. Look for mentions of his name on NPR, and in the [...]

Last spring Peter Kline of the UVA MFA program read two triolets (a poetic form in iambic tetrameter with the rhyme scheme ABaAabAB that was new to me) at our graduate conference. The first two lines are also the last, but their meaning the second time has shifted slightly. The first line is repeated half-way [...]

This semester I am teaching 2 sections of MDST110, the introductory digital methods class for the competitive Media Studies major. My friend Jim Cocola, the Wikipedian publisher of Mirador Press, has convinced me of the efficacy of teaching media studies courses with wikis. So we set up a wiki for the hundred strong MDST110 class [...]

At left is the new wallpaper for Caroline Slaughter’s site. Her initials spiral like a nautilus, which is appropriate for her latest argonautical endeavors: recording an album, producing a show, starting a production company. The updated site content features folksy tracks and dramatic images in her gallery under a new favicon to match the wallpaper. [...]

I spent twenty hours last week in Montreal. It takes ten hours to drive from Washington, D.C. to Montreal (a little more, actually, depending on customs), which left us twenty hours in the city—just long enough to realize that Montreal deserves at least a week of proper exploring.

It began with a post I discovered this spring on Craig’s List. A few phone interviews and an accepted summer position later, I decided to drive 3,000 miles in seven days from Washington, D.C. to Santa Cruz, California in late June with my sister Katrina.
As I drove from my house in Charlottesville, Virginia to D.C., [...]