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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 [...]

Culture | Media | PopCult | Technology

Netflix to Deliver All 13 Episodes of ‘House of Cards’ on One Day

My sister would fill up a video tape with episodes of Babylon 5 as they aired, and she’d send me each tape as it filled up. When a new tape arrived, my wife and I would watch the whole thing in one sitting. While I haven’t deliberately made time to watch any TV show since [...]

Amusing | Books | Ethics | Humanities | Personal | PopCult | Religion

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 [...]

Academia | Amusing | Education | Games | PopCult | Rhetoric

Surviving the Next Apocalypse: a Modest Curriculum

Obviously, given this surge in student demand, we need to make survivalist education another distinctive feature of our educational mission, and we must scramble to build institutional capacity in “apocalypse preparedness.” The admissions office already has brochures: “Where would you send your child: someplace that prepares them for a 20th-century job, or a community that [...]

Drama | Personal | PopCult

Next Role for My 10yo: Peter Pan

She’ll perform next week as the bumblebee “Hi… are you a flower?” in Pinkalicious (sharing the role with two of her fellow Annies) but today Stage Right posted the cast list for the homeschool preteen production of Peter Pan.

She’s a natural for the part.

The cast list for the teen “Wizard of [...]

Academia | Culture | Health | Media | PopCult | Science | Sociology

Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?

The Twitter version: There’s a slight decrease in violent crime when violent movies are playing. People who like violence tend to go watch the movie instead of going out and doing violent things.

Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent [...]

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 [...]

Amusing | Culture | Language | PopCult | Rhetoric | Writing

4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence

I’m particularly tickled by the MLA reference. 4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence | The Onion

Aesthetics | Books | Culture | Design | Humanities | Literature | Media | PopCult

At Home In Fantasy’s Nerd-Built Worlds

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In other words, more than the profound lessons on the corrupting influence of power, more than the stirring battle scenes, more even than beloved characters like Frodo and Sam, readers came to Tolkien’s books for the rich, magical world that they built out of his words. Martin has taken this lesson to heart in his [...]

Cyberculture | Games | Media | PopCult

Lost Treasures of Infocom Review [Mobile App]

Someone’s put a lot of time into ensuring the games play exceptionally well on mobile. The on-screen keyboard is a necessary evil, one that’s ameliorated by a great little auto-complete feature. It’s context-sensitive, so if you want to whip something from your inventory out in a pinch, the game will probably predict it by the [...]