Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.