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Anne Of Green Gables Blond On Book Cover

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Er.. no. This is not Anne of Green Gables. Canada’s beloved literary heroine is a freckled redhead who thinks she’s plain. This stock photo hottie in no way fits the bill.

And Wuthering Heights is not a prequel to Twilight, as this cover design seems to suggest.

Anne Of Green Gables Blond On [...]

Culture | Essays | Humanities | Literacy | Modding | Technology | Writing

The “Bogosity Generator” Tool In Science Fiction

A wonderful analysis of an important part of world-building in science fiction.

As most of you probably know, filmmakers use the term “MacGuffin” to stand for some object that various characters in the tale are competing for. A secret paper, a formula, a stunning gem, a statue of a Maltese falcon…

In Fantasy and SF [...]

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I’m an English Professor in a Movie

This is making the rounds among my English professor Facebook friends.

I’m an English Professor in a Movie

Good morning, and welcome to Advanced English Literature—I’m Professor Anglosoundingname. As you can see, I have a mane of silver hair and wear a corduroy blazer with leather elbow patches stitched with corduroy [...]

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Know What It Really Feels Like To Be Learning Disabled?

Most teachers are those who, not surprisingly, have made it through the educational system smoothly enough to replicate it, even when they think of themselves as radical reformers of that system. Especially English teachers. English teachers are the gatekeepers to the normal brained. (I see this all the time when I am hanging out with [...]

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A Wealth of Words

People with similar vocabulary sizes may vary significantly in their talent and in the depth of their understanding. Nonetheless, there’s no better index to accumulated knowledge and general competence than the size of a person’s vocabulary. Simply put: knowing more words makes you smarter. And between 1962 and the present, a big segment of the [...]

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Shall I Encode Thee In DNA? Sonnets Stored On Double Helix

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If you took everything human beings have ever written — an estimated 50 billion megabytes of text — and stored it in DNA, that DNA would still weigh less than a granola bar.”There’s no problem with holding a lot of information in DNA,” Goldman says. “The problem is paying for doing that.”Agilent waived the cost [...]

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Copy Of The Scarlet Letter Can’t Believe The Notes High Schooler Writing In Margins

Baffled that the young reader for some reason circled the word “cottage” every time she came across it in the text, the used copy of The Scarlet Letter stated that it truly began to doubt Dobson’s reading-comprehension skills when she wrote a note on page 37 suggesting the entire novel might in fact be an [...]

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My Tween Loves the “Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go” Series

I’m reading the “Heck: Where Bad Kids Go” books to my 10yo at bedtime. The author envisions prepubescent hell as a kind of eternal middle school, with popular kids and bullies and pointless rules and no hope. Plenty of literary references — the eleven-year-old hero is Milton Fauster, and he has a friend in the [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]