While our daughter is performing in Stage Right’s Pippin across town at the Greensburg Garden & Civic Center Friday, my wife and I will be portraying characters in works of art as part of a “SweetArt Dance” at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art. I’m digging out my pirate eyepatch and learning about glass-blowing for…
The school was plagued by violence and disorder from the start, and by 2010 it was rank [sic] in the bottom five of all public schools in the state of Massachusetts. That was when Andrew Bott — the sixth principal in seven years — showed up, and everything started to change. “We got rid of the…
I very much appreciate that nobody spoiled Star Wars: A New Hope, or Star Trek Beyond. But even after we learn for the first time what happens to Ebeneezer Scrooge, or Bilbo, or Alice, or Jesus, the good stories still retain their cultural power. Stories are much more than plot. [A]rtistic appreciation, which reviewers are…
Promoting science and technology education to the exclusion of the humanities may seem like a good idea, but it is deeply misguided. Scientific American has always been an ardent supporter of teaching STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But studying the interaction of genes or engaging in a graduate-level project to develop software for self-driving…
Avoid trying to publicly shame a ballet mistress who can write.
This morning, someone pseudonymously spammed the parent email list at my daughter’s ballet school, with a scolding complaint about a delayed cast list. It read, in part: “We pay our fees on time…. We received the email to donate to the school’s fundraiser this week on time. But no cast List. This is a teachable moment to demonstrate that being on time, especially when a promise is involved, is important.”
The school’s response, posted about a half hour later, ended thus: “Emailing using an address we can not identify and failing to sign your email shows a lack of conviction. Failing to understand that it is a relatively easy thing to discover your identity through your IP address is another indication that your action was not thought through. If the lessons you wanted to teach here were your own ignorance, arrogance and cowardice, you’ve succeeded.”
The whole response is worth a sincere, rousing “slow clap”.
A photographer blogged about taking photos inspired by Wuthering Heights. Note please the dark clouds and the wall of rain looming in on us…. We were racing against the impending drenching, and chuckling at the comments from a family of climbers “oh how beautiful! I think they just got married!” We had to break the…
My mother had a cousin who served in Viet Nam. In the late 70s, he brought dozens of Vietnamese refugees to America, and one summer there were 30-40 Vietnamese men and boys living in my house, sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor of our rec room, as Cousin Jim worked out places for them to stay,…
While everyone complains about the subjects their parents forced them into, I am in the dance studio every lunchtime. Dance gets me into school. Dance gives me something to pour my head and heart into. It gives me a feeling of belonging, creativity, security and freedom. | Then the bell rings and it’s back to Ohm’s…
You are invited to time travel to two art exhibitions witnessed by Jane Austen: the Sir Joshua Reynolds retrospective in 1813 or the Shakespeare Gallery as it looked in 1796. These two Georgian blockbusters took place, years apart, in the same London exhibition space at 52 Pall Mall (it no longer exists). When Austen visited…
Before a school play, a principal worries parents will complain about all that lost test-preparation time. [T]his principal assumes I will be alarmed that my child takes a weekly visual art class, a dance class, and a music class. She is pretty sure I’m going to think there’s something fishy going on, that Real Learning…
This is nice, but what I really want to see is an Elizabethan-style revenge play featuring Clippy. December 9, 1968… in an underground convention center in the heart of San Francisco, Doug Engelbart gave The Mother Of All Demos, introducing the world to an astonishing slew of technologies including word processing, video conferencing, windows, links,…
Leonard exists in slow motion but lives in a regular speed world. When he discovers his office crush is getting transferred to Florida, Leonard decides he must somehow become regular speed to win her heart before she leaves town for good.
9 Photography Tips
Lighten Up — The Nib — Medium.
Sara Heffernan designed these wonderful visual-textual gags. Graphic Design Pun Cards on Behance.
Blogging this so I can assign it to my “Video Game Culture and Theory” class.This history of video game graphics is a walk down memory lane | Polygon.
In one of the most compelling chapters, “‘Others play at dice’: Friendship and Dungeons & Dragons,” Jeffery L. Nicholas offers several examples of friendships between characters and players in D&D (as well as friendships from Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride, A Song of Ice and Fire, and his own life. “One reason Aristotle…
Victorians had to stay still for 3 seconds for formal portraits, which makes them seem stiffer than they really were.