William Reagan is a freelance advertising copywriter specializing in compressing large concepts into short sentences. He enjoys observing the American political system in the same way voyeurs stare at car wrecks on the side of the highway, less concerned with who was involved than with the particulars of how it happened. (It’s best not to drive behind him during an election year.) He squirrels away his literary acorns at WilliamReagan.com.
Columns
Wednesday, June 22 2011
So You Think You Can Govern? The Much-Needed Political Equivalent of 'So You Think You Can Dance'
What reality television has done for prime time programming it can also do for presidential politics.
Monday, April 18 2011
Martyrdom and the Marketing of the Afterlife
Considering the Afterlife as an eternal baseball game illuminates why 72 virgins might not be the ideal final reward.
Monday, February 7 2011
One Nation, OMG
Agreeing to disagree doesn’t make your argument less 'right' -- but it does make it more reasonable.
Monday, November 1 2010
Sweeping Clean the US Elections May Require a New Broom: Why Not Elect a Witch?
There are reasons to dismiss Christine O'Donnell's candidacy, but witchcraft shouldn't be one of them.
Friday, July 23 2010
Sarah Palin's Creative Vocabulization
Armchair pundits lit up the blogosphere when Sarah Palin tweeted a non-word. Don't we have more important things to worry about?
Reviews
Monday, March 29 2010
An Uncommon History of Common Things by Bethanne Patrick and John Thompson
Thanks to this book, a friend greeted me with an earnest handshake, and I remarked that the handshake developed in England several hundred years ago as a means for people to demonstrate that they were not holding weapons.
Sunday, July 19 2009
The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English
"Slang is the language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes to work," says Carol Sandburg.
Tuesday, January 6 2009
Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, is my favorite evidence of the resurgence in syntactical attentiveness.
Monday, December 15 2008
The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Superstitions by The Diagram Group
Science is great, more power to it, but superstitions are fun, the little bits of weird poetry scribbled into the margins of the Algebra book.
Friday, September 19 2008
Semantricks & The Daily Candy Lexicon
Since, like Shakespeare, we ignore the bulk of available words, a few amusing new bon mots isn’t going to clutter the word soup any further. They will certainly help to spice it up, though.
Blogs
Wednesday, December 16 2009
Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing - Holt [$14.00]
