The Fies Files

In 1899, a London acquaintance named T. Douglas Murray asked Mr. Clemens to write the Introduction for an English translation of the trial r...

I hadn't planned on writing anything about the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. I didn't think I had anything new or in...

Today's insult is more of a back-handed compliment. While living briefly in Vienna, the Clemens family hired a maid who stuck her nose i...

Today's subject is a London book reviewer who, Mr. Clemens felt, prized proper grammar at the expense of clarity and style. I suppose we...

Today's subject is Clemens's attorney William Hamersly, who advised him poorly in several matters, including contracts with the afor...

As mentioned, I'm reading the massive first volume of the thrice-massiver Autobiography of Mark Twain, and about a hundred pages in find...

Once in a while, my wife Karen and I like to pick some nearby small town to explore. Some are so close we simply take them for granted; othe...

Suzette Chan of Sequential Tart , a website that has been very good to me over the years, has written a really nice review that touches on ...

Bite-sized morsels, served Herb Caen style . . . * * * . Karen and I saw "The King's Speech" a week ago . . . thought it was ...

I've got this chair. It's an office desk chair: comfy, adjustable, pretty good ergonomics. But because I tend to lean on my left elb...

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I'm helping organize a Graphic Medicine conference in Chicago as a follow-up to the 2010 London confere...

... so far. Courtesy of Bad Astronomer Phil Plait , whose blog is a regular stop of mine, comes this gorgeous image of the most recent full ...

Space Times, the magazine of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), which awarded WHTTWOT the 2009 Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literat...