I have felt like a graduate student recently, dipping into Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year to write about my plague shirt, a piece that ran in the May 15th issue of the Times Literary Supplement, and then getting what amounts to a crash course in Coleridge to write about the Ancient Mariner Big Read, a project of Philip Hoare and company, for newyorker.com.  Bonus photo of the descendants of literary giants.

Photo by Philip Hoare of Samuel John Taylor Coleridge and Ed Shakspeare, at the Church of Ottery St. Mary in Devon, England.