Education and Sociology rise in QS World University Subject Rankings - King's College London

We met decades after “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” took her from the slush pile to literary celebrity, in a flash. September 22, 2026Photograph by Richard Howard / LIFE / ShutterstockLiterary lives, like the lives of plants, follow many trajectories. Some bloom early. Some blossom late. Some grow in view of everyone, sending out shoots where all and sundry can watch them experiment. Others bide their time underground, husbanding resources and awaiting their season until they are good, ready, and ripe. Annie Dillard, who died last week, at eighty-one, did not literally emerge from nowhere. The eldest daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh family, she attended Hollins College, in Roanoke, Virginia, and married her writing teacher, Richard Dillard, at the end of her sophomore year. After a serious case of pneumonia in her twenties, she borrowed a notion from Henry David Thoreau and set out to write a “meteorological journal of the mind.” She was, at the time, a poet with a rich inner life, a shelf’s worth of notebooks, and the grating sense that her husband’s male graduate students took her ambitions something less than seriously.

A Russian man secretly working for Ukraine's intelligence services has shared videos of surveillance work he says he has done for Kyiv inside Russia. The man, who we are calling Ivan, claims to have played a role in Ukrainian drone attacks on strategic bombers and munitions factories on his home soil. He features in a BBC World Service documentary about the shadowy world of Russian saboteurs. Ivan was cautious about how much detail he shared, making it impossible to verify the activities he claims to have carried out.56 minutes ago