Bureaucrats Put the Squeeze on College Newspapers

Few school newspapers are financially independent from the institutions they cover, says Chris Evans, president of the College Media Association. As a result, college administrators hold powerful leverage over student journalists and their faculty advisers. The need for aggressive student news organizations is as acute as ever. But image-obsessed administrators are hastening the demise of these once-formidable campus watchdogs. –Adam Willis, The Atlantic

3 hours ago in Academia, Culture, Education, Ethics, Journalism, Media, Writing.

Thank you, male ballet dancers everywhere, for making moments like this possible.

2 days ago in Aesthetics, Art, Culture, Empathy, Ethics, Health, History, Media.

In August 1999 I was blogging about Poohsticks Bridge, penmanship, Archimedes, and ebooks

In August 1999, I was blogging about Conservation efforts at Poohsticks Bridge A Penmanship camp in Philadelphia Recovering the only known copy of a lost work by the Greek mathematician Archimedes (erased by a 10th-century monk who scraped off the writing to reuse the parchment) Fourth-graders using e-books at Resurrection Catholic School in Dayton, Ohio Noted bibliophile Sven Birkerts having a disappointing encounter with ebooks

3 days ago in Books, Cyberculture, History, Media, Personal, Technology, Weblogs, Writing.

What is Technical Writing?

I noticed an uptick in traffic to an older page, “Technical Writing: What Is It?” So I touched it up and created a new graphic.

3 days ago in Aesthetics, Cyberculture, Design, Technology, Writing.

Take my feedback if you want to pass.

I won’t be so assertive in the first week of class, but I created this meme out of frustration that some students don’t actually read the feedback that I spend a lot of time writing. (I have experimented with giving more oral feedback. I’ll likely do more of that in my online Shakespeare class.)

3 days ago in Academia, Education, Essays, Media, PopCult, Psychology, Rhetoric, Writing.

Where Silence Has Lease (TNG Rewatch: Season 2, Episode 2)

Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. The Enterprise spends a lot of time in a budget-saving black void, where the crew scans things, searches databases, launches a probe, navigates in circles, gives up, sets a self-destruct timer, philosophizes about death, shuts off the timer, and warps away. I had never seen this episode before, so technically for me this isn’t a “rewatch.” I found the opening…

The girl’s first day on set filming for “The First Day of Summer”

Carolyn plays a teenager who’s outside the “in” group that’s stalked by a killer. She has some action sequences that I know she’ll enjoy filming. I also have “two and a half scenes” playing her father.

The Child (TNG Rewatch: Season 2, Episode 1)

Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. As s science fiction story, this was an interesting premise with great production values and character moments, that ultimately didn’t deliver any real drama because our main characters lacked any significant agency. The Child opens with some lovely footage of the Enterprise alongside another starship, and a stunning shot of a shuttle leaving the landing bay, with another starship floating…

Unplugging for a Few Hours at Spruce Flats Bog

Visited a bog created when loggers cleared part of a forest. Laurel Summit State Park.

The Case for Slow Journalism: When to Unplug from the Endless News Cycle

Often when I see people in my social media feed criticizing “the media,” they are unfairly blaming journalists for how the social media ecosystem misuses journalism. Here’s an example from a post by someone arguing that CNN is being unfairly biased against Bernie Sanders. The complaint is that CNN criticizes Sanders for making a claim that a different CNN story seems to support. If you already believe that CNN is…

The first ever photograph of light as both a particle and wave

There’s so much I don’t know! When teaching rhetoric, I often use “Is light a wave, or is it a particle?” as an example of a false dichotomy. My high school physics teacher (Rear Admiral Edward Metcalfe Peebles) set up a lecture giving us the “pro-wave” evidence and the “pro-particle” evidence and inviting us to take sides, then sprung the “wavicle” at us (a thing that sometimes acts like a…