So today's New York Times Book Review was thick with personal connections: not only is Christine Kenneally, who reviewed Um..., a friend of a Lingua Franca editor, but Margalit Fox, whose book on sign language was also reviewed today, appeared in a panel discussion on linguists & journalists I organized for the Linguistic Society of America in Boston in 2004.

What's more personally meaningful, though, is that Robert and Lee Dalzell's book, The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America was also reviewed today in the Book Review. No, no, I'm not a Rockefeller. But Robert Dalzell, Jr. was my first American Studies professor at Williams. He was a tremendous teacher, frightfully Socratic, a critical grader -- for his eye I wrote my first academic arguments, and he gave me my first college A.

How unexpectedly connected this all turned out.