April 30, 2025: Common falcons

Today we're spending all our time in higher education. Merriam-Webster Senior Editor and UMass Amherst alumna Emily Brewster joins us on the upper floors of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library to meet with digital content editor Lauren Hubbard. She introduces us to the library’s most notorious residents, the peregrine falcons, with names that should be of particular interest to our Word Nerd. The birds making their roost and catching attention with eggs close to hatching. And, just down the street at Amherst College, there is a revered literary publication called “The Common” that is celebrating its 25th year of publication. And on the last day of National Poetry Month, we talk with Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Acker and student interns Kei Lim and Aidan Cooper about the place of poetry and prose in a nation that continues to chip away at the arts.