E.B. White

Tuesday

July 21, 2026

Why spiders deserve our respect, not fear or disgust

From our UK edition

I had not thought much about spiders until I read Maria Tatar’s Arachnomania; now I can think of little else. I even watched a film mentioned in the book – Eight-Legged Freaks. It was awful, though it did bring home how very scared people can be of spiders, especially large ones. But, as Tatar shows, spiders are also part of human history and culture; and they really are different. I use fly sprays to get rid of insect intruders. I would never now use them against arachnids as well. Tatar was first drawn to spiders by the Covid pandemic which locked us all down. It was then she discovered that the eight-legged freaks offered the possibility of ‘finding a model for survival and creativity in times of seclusion, darkness and gloom’. They are, as we shall see, paragons of survival.

Monday

December 6, 2021

Peter Wood

Down with Strunk and White

E.B. White was the author of two delightful children’s books, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, perhaps three if you count the lesser known The Trumpet of the Swan. White also wrote a great many not-so-memorable but often anthologized New Yorker and Harper’s essays. But he is best known to generations of American students as the co-author of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. The man whose name comes first on that pamphlet-sized compendium of do’s and don’ts, is William Strunk Jr., a Cornell English professor for forty-six years who would have sunk forever in death’s dateless night were it not for White’s sentimental resurrection of him in the pamphlet’s six-page introduction.