By Allan Metcalf. Whoa, that’s Shakespeare. (Sonnet 60.) But it’s the best description I know of the verse form invented by his contemporary Edmund Spenser for The Fairy Queen, a marathon of a poem set in an allegorical Fairyland full of “fierce wars and faithful loves” (in Spenser’s words) and populated by believable characters. If you get the olde fashyonde spelyng out of the way, and concentrate on the story rather than the complicated allegory, as I have argued in two previous posts, you’ll have an amazing journey through its more than 30,000 lines arranged in 3,500 stanzas. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. The New York Times has begun a strange new series titled “Verbatim,” mini-docudramas culled from transcripts of court documents. In its inaugural video, the punch line kicks in when the office worker being relentlessly grilled about the presence of a photocopy machine in his office is finally badgered into admitting that a machine exists from which he extracts copies of documents. What is that machine called? “Xerox,” he answers desperately. More...

By Ben Yagoda. In March 2013, I wrote a short article for an online publication called The Week. Following the current mode, I composed it in the form of a list: “7 Bogus Grammar ‘Errors’ You Don’t Need to Worry About.” I explained why the following “rules” are no longer supportable, if they ever were. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. My all-time favorite Chronicle article, “Yagoda’s Unfamiliar Quotations” (mentioned here once before, in The Case of the Extra Word), is a reminiscence about a collection of unquoted quotables—memorable remarks by ordinary folk who never got famous. More...

By Chronicle Staff. Report: “Federal Student-Loan Servicing: Contract Problems and Public Solutions”
Authors: Eric M. Fink, an associate professor at Elon University’s School of Law, and Roland Zullo, an associate research scientist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Institute for Research on Labor, Employment, and the Economy
Summary: Students are not well served by the student-loan-servicing industry, the researchers argue, as there is an inherent conflict between the profit motive and responsive, quality service. Given the large number of complaints against loan servicers by students, Mr. Fink and Mr. Zullo argue that the current loan-servicing model should be reimagined. More...