The only good thing to come out of Lord Byron’s disastrous marriage to Anne Milbanke was the incomparable Ada Lovelace — The specter of her father’s genius dominated her life, while her mother, a genius of a different sort, was determined to eradicate any tendency she had to emulate him. But Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron and mathematician Anne Milbanke charted her own course between the rocky shoals of…

You’ll get chills when you hear the rest of this delightful tale — Do our desires die with us, or do they hang around long after we do? If you’ve ever lost something precious, you know how badly you wanted to get it back. …

Is who people think you are getting in the way of your ability to communicate? — Are writers who use pen names and avatars to mask their true identities cowards? I used to think so, at least when it came to content creators. It’s one thing to be a woman trying to get her novel published in the 1800s and quite another to be one writing…

Be prepared to be appalled — Alison, the Garrulous Glasgewian, suggested I write one of these tell-all essays. I had a hard time coming up with ten things about myself that I haven’t already revealed in my writing. You know what that means, right? Since I’ve already tapped out the good and the bad, the only…

And it's no surprise that most of them make fun of women — After this year's Oscars kerfluffle, some people are demanding the abolition of insult humor, especially that which mocks someone's challenges or physical appearance. Others say it's a tradition rooted in the antics of the court jesters of old speaking truth to power and everyone needs to lighten up. Here are…

The devil came for the actor last night, but then Smith won — The Oscar snooze fest just got interesting again thanks to one actor’s onstage assault of another. At this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, best actor nominee Will Smith responded to a joke comedian Chris Rock made about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, mounting the stage and smacking him, not playfully but…

Surprising facts about what makes you a more likely victim than others — I got a call the other night from my 20-something son in California. ME: “Hey, what’s up?” SON: “My car was stolen.” ME: “Again?!!!” You heard that right, folks. This isn’t the first time my son’s been an auto-theft victim. He’s had the same car stolen twice from precisely the…