A colleague put me in touch with an award-winning TV journalist who took some time off for eldercare, and is now having a rough time re-entering the profession.
Here’s the advice I collected, which includes the wisdom of a former student who’s now a TV producer in Houston, and also draws on other sources I use when I teach career readiness classes for English majors.
Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark tries to interest Odo in a holosuite fantasy, but Odo prefers realism. Jake passes through the casino, on his way to play his father’s baseball program. Dax is amused but unmoved by Bashir’s romantic overtures, and kindly suggests a “high-pitched sonic shower.” She’s on her way to Ops to look at a plot contrivance particle field Kira and Sisko are puzzling over. O’Brien, who a few episodes…
Rewatching ST:TNG L’Kor tells Worf the Klingons have chosen to remain in what was initially Romulan POW camp, because if were known they were captured alive, that would bring dishonor on their family. The Romulan Tokath gave up his military career to spare their lives and lead their new settlement. The Klingon survivors, their descendants, and at least a handful of Romulans now live together in peace. Worf bristles when…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Dax and Kira are chatting in a runabout (Dax says Morn is “kind of cute”) when they discover humanoid life on a moon that’s scheduled to be technobabbled into uninhabitability in the name of progress. On the moon, Kira meets Mullibok (the great character actor Brien Keith), who escaped to this moon decades ago, during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. With folksy stories and a cantankerous attitude (he…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Dax is apprehended for the allegedly criminal actions of a previous host. Bashir is unsuccessfully trying to escort Dax to her quarters when he witnesses people attaching her. Instead of calling for backup, he tries to be a hero and gets knocked out. The station manages to catch the baddies’ getaway ship, and we learn Klaestron Four has a warrant to arrest Curzon Dax for treason and murder.…
What a story! Sharing stories like this (that is, white abolitionists who stood up against whites deeply invested in the racist status quo), is probably something that makes racists annoyed. Like the various assassination attempts Cassius Marcellus Clay survived, or the time a tour group of 60 proud supporters of the status quo casually toured themselves through the barricaded, armored doors of his abolitionist newspaper and percussively redecorated…
The AP’s own rules say an 18yo is an adult, not a teen. In a light-hearted story about a high school event where some are 17 and some are 18, you could get away with calling them all “teenagers,” but in a serious story, it’s crucial to be consistent. This suspect is a white man. Shortly after the “teenager” tweet, the AP released another tweet referring to “a white gunman…
I just dusted off a #textadventure project I started in Inform6 around 1999. By around 2007 I had rebuilt about 90% of it in #inform7 and expanded it in fits and starts. But I haven’t touched it in 11 years. It took me about 90 minutes to update all the deprecated code, but it runs!
In this short documentary, I voice Herb Morrison, the radio reporter famous for narrating the 1937 crash of the Hindenberg — 85 years ago this month. It was an honor to learn more about this man (born in nearby Scottdale, Pa.) and to interpret his words. Local history can be so fascinating! Herb Morrison, native of Scottdale, PA, witnessed the first air disaster in US history in 1937. While that…
Rewatching ST:DS9 O’Brien tries to weasel his way out of an assignment to ferry Bashir to a Bajoran village that sent a vague (apparently medical?) distress call. The cheerfully oblivious Bashir asks O’Brien to call him “Julien” instead of “sir.” (O’Brien: “Is that an order?”) The landing party is led to Sirah, an old man who names O’Brien as someone sent to him by the Prophets. Because this still early in…
Jonathan Bailey writes: In short, Bello, an author who admitted to plagiarizing in her now-cancelled debut novel, wrote an article about the experience and, in that article, included poor paraphrasing without attribution of an article that I wrote over a decade ago. It’s a moment that even 16 years of work in this field did not prepare me for. To be honest, even as I write this, I am still…