The history of the gravestone of Sylvia Plath is tumultuous. On 30 April 1963, just over two months after Plath's death, Aurelia Schober Plath, the poet's mother, received a letter from Hilda Farrar, an aunt of Ted Hughes'.  Mrs. Plath routinely annotated her letters with thoughts about the correspondent, ideas for replies, and, as well, comments intended solely for her eyes. Her notations were made in something resembling cycles: both upon receipt and as well through re-readings over the years. Many were made, also, as she prepared her daughter's correspondence for publication in Letters Home (1975), and when she surveyed her daughters' papers—and part of her own archive—for sale to the Lilly Library (1977). In the letter cited above, Hilda wrote: "Billie [Ted Hughes' father] and I went to look at Sylvia's grave last week and he tidied it up as best he could. It appears it is unwise to put up a headstone for some months until the ground has had time...

What are we supposed to believe? We rely on technology: some more than others. We use it for its convenience and generally for its swiftness. No longer does one really have to remember on their own where we read something because we can keyword search, highlight, makes notes, and bookmark passages that we read. Saturday night, while working on one of my papers for the Sylvia Plath 2012 Symposium, I tweeted that Sylvia Plath mentioned The New Yorker 58 times in her journals. I got this number by searching my Kindle for PC app on my computer. There were 61 results, but three of them were in the front matter (list of illustrations), notes, and the actual caption for the illustration. (Maybe I should add that I searched for the term in quotation marks; repeating the search just now without quotation marks I got 62.) To my consternation, I woke up this morning to see that someone else found 63 results. Of course we all want to be right! I thought: How could this be? So, I searche...

Did Sylvia Plath predict the future in her 1961 poem "Insomniac"? From the last stanza, "The city is a map of cheerful twitters now, And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank, Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed." Sounds like my commute!