Eleanor Kagan

People have funny ways of describing hit pop songs. A song is "infectious," an "earworm." It "gets under your skin." It's not summer without little annoyances — sunburn, mosquito bites, sweat — just as it's not summer without the Song of the Summer. We're talking about a song (or two, ...

What hath the Bard wrought? William Shakespeare was a word nerd if we ever saw one, and he's left a legacy of terms and idioms that have since diffused throughout pop culture, writing and colloquial speech. You've probably been quoting language Shakespeare helped popularize ("eyeball," "lonely," "gossip"), without even knowing ...

2013 felt like the year in which the music video completed its shift from a four-minute commercial into a fully-immersive art experience. Videos have been more than just marketing tools for record labels to boost their album sales for a long time, but artists this year joyously pushed the idea ...

The first published crossword puzzle was printed on December 21, 1913, in the The New York World. It was written by Arthur Wynne, a British journalist who moved to the United States at age 19 and wound up in New York City. His puzzle, diamond-shaped and identified as ...