Through a series of fortunate hyperlinks, I recently stumbled across aphorisms on journalism by John Bennet, former New Yorker editor and professor in magazine writing at Columbia Journalism School. In a brief 2022 obit on the Columbia j-school site, Betsy Morais, editor in chief of the Columbia ...

Richard Kostelanetz is interested in “radical constraint.” And the aphorism is the ideal form in which to put that interest into practice. Aphorisms are, by definition, short. But Kostelanetz takes concision to an extreme by restricting himself even further — to aphorisms consisting of just four ...

I first blogged about the aphorisms of Ninus Nestorović back in December of 2007. Ninus was recently in touch with some new aphorisms, deftly translated by his 15-year-old daughter, Tea. Ninus is a journalist, satirist, and ex-professional footballer who lives in Novi Sad, Serbia. These sayings c...

Ashleigh Brilliant, the prolific creator of the drawings-aphorisms he called “Pot-Shots”, died last month in in Santa Barbara, CA. This New York Times obit has a nice summary of his writing career and a selection of some of his best sayings. A piece in the local Santa Barbara outlet Noozhawk has ...

Writer, teacher and translator Irving Weiss passed away on June 13. We have Irving to thank for bringing the aphorisms of Malcolm de Chazal into English.

Malcolm de Chazal (Geary’s Guide, pp. 359–361) was an aphorist and painter from Mauritius. I discovered the 1979 Sun edition of Chazal’s aphori...