Features

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Employee Subcontracts Own Work to China, Collects Full Salary, Watches Cat Videos

This sounds like something from a Dilbert comic. An employee pays a Chinese worker a fraction of his own salary to do his work for him, and spends the day goofing around at the office.

Employee profile –mid-40’s software developer versed in C, C++, perl, java, Ruby, php, python, etc. Relatively long tenure with the [...]

Academia | Business | Culture | Education | Essays | Humanities | Literacy

My View: What will you do with an English degree? Plenty

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I just found my first reading assignment for the “Intro to Literary Study” class I’ll be teaching in a week.

Almost every college student who considers majoring in English – or French, or philosophy, or art history – inevitably hears the question: “What in the world are you going to do with that?” The question [...]

Books | Business | Culture | Ethics | Humanities | Literacy | Literature | Media | Rhetoric

Worried about the future of books? Here’s what you can do.

It’s a lot easier to be selfish, to be an artistic libertarian who decides “I will just concern myself with making my work and I’ll just hope and pray there’s still some kind of an apparatus in place to edit, design, produce, market, distribute and sell it when it’s done, or else imagine that I’ll [...]

Aesthetics | Business | Games | PopCult

Vote for your favorite Monopoly token — or else!

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One of the six current game pieces will be voted out, to make room for one of these new ones. I’m partial to the captain’s chair in Star Trek Monopoly. What do you think about these options?

Hasbro, maker of the board game available in 111 countries and 43 languages, is replacing one of the [...]

Books | Business | Culture | History | Literature | Media

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2013?

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years – an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 [...]

Academia | Business | Culture | Design | Education | Ethics | Modding | Rhetoric

Why Students Today Complain About Grades—and How We Can Fix It

I periodically get emails from former students who thank me, several years after a class is over, for challenging them in a way that prepared them for life after college. I don’t get so many grateful comments while the students are still in college.

I don’t blame my students, but a certain proportion does seem [...]

Academia | Business | Cyberculture | Education | Journalism | Media | Rhetoric | Technology

Snow Fall: Finally an articulation for the digerati of what a big, expensive newsroom can do

Yes, the NYT multimedia “Snow Fall” was wonderful, and my new media colleagues are excited by it. But it took 11 staff members 6 months to publish. Is this really what new media journalists should emulate? How can I scale this down to the classroom?

The future of journalism is about speed, volume, rough and [...]

Business | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Design | Essays | Journalism | Media | Modding | Social_Software | Technology | Usability | Writing

What the New York Times’s ‘Snow Fall’ Means to Online Journalism’s Future

The New York Times debuted a new multimedia feature Thursday so beautiful it has a lot of people wondering — especially those inside the New York Times — if the mainstream media is about to forgo words and pictures for a whole lot more. Unlike a standard words-on-page article that doesn’t diverge too much from [...]

Business | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Ethics | Government | Media | Politics | PopCult

That Was Fast: Hollywood Already Browbeat The Republicans Into Retracting Report On Copyright Reform

So, late Friday, we reported on how the Republican Study Committee (the conservative caucus of House Republicans) had put out a surprisingly awesome report about copyright reform. You can read that post to see the details. The report had been fully vetted and reviewed by the RSC before it was released. However, as soon as [...]

Business | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Journalism | Media | Social_Software

So long, Newsweek

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Reaction to the cover:

- ‏Newsweek’s last print issue has just a hashtag on the cover. Like using your final breath to ID the killer. @sacca

- Newsweek’s last cover: one more flippant stunt. Ooh! A Hashtag! I’m proud to have worked there 1985-93. @jswatz

- [...]