Bilbo's Random Thought Collection

This meme recently appeared on my Facebook feed: I didn't know whether to be sad or angry, so I settled on both. And I figured I might a...

In the wake of the presidential election, there's been a lot of commentary on both the left and the right about what the results say abo...

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may recall that my undergraduate major in college was Linguistics, with a specializ...

Der Furor has done almost immeasurable harm to this county in many areas: he has worked to wreck our health care system (in the middle of a ...

I was listening to an interesting discussion on my local NPR station the other day in which the panelists and callers were discussing the v...

Thanks to my undergraduate degree in Linguistics and my lifelong interest in foreign languages, I was drawn to an article to which my frien...

I recently ran across a reference to a 2016 study  - The World's Most Literate Nations (WMLN)  - conducted by Central Connecticut State...

We live in a complicated and difficult world, whether it's in the jungles or the rain forest or the concrete canyons of the big cities....

The fall term (or semester, or whatever) has begun on college campuses around the country, and millions of students are settling back down ...

Now that conservative Republicans control the majorities in both houses of Congress and the majority of state governments across the countr...

Here's a really interesting article from Lifehacker by Melanie Pinola - The Top 10 Skills We Wish Were Taught in School, But Usually A...

Many years ago when I was a young whippersnapper growing up in Pittsburgh*, I wanted to be a scientist. I loved the imagery of laboratories...

If, like me, you spend a lot of time shaking your head at the ludicrous antics of Congress in general and many of its individual members in...

Every once in a while, I feel a burning urge to somehow put to use that degree in Linguistics I earned all those years ago. This time, it s...

I've written often enough in this space about the sad state of American education, and the lack of respect we show both for education in...

You more than likely have seen one of the many stories in print, on the air, and online over the past few days, reporting the decision to st...

Since we live in a time when decisions on important topics are made on the basis of half-baked bumper sticker slogans rather than careful th...

Along with all the other parts of the economy that are going belly-up, we now have one of the nation's most venerable institutions - the...

Just like individuals and families, communities everywhere are looking for ways to tighten their belts and live in a new era of shrinking bu...

The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying the reading habits of Americans since 1982, and the news has been consistently dismal...