Playwright Arthur Miller, the creator of The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, has died at the age of 89. —American playwright [Arthur] Miller dies (BBC) Thanks for sending me the sad news, Rosemary. I wrote on All My Sons and Death of a Salesman in my dissertation-turned-book.
NASA — Last year was the fourth warmest year on average for our planet since the late 1800s, according to NASA scientists. To determine if the Earth is warming or cooling, scientists look at average temperatures. To get an “average” temperature, scientists take the warmest and the coolest temperatures in a day, and calculate the…
James Guckert, who reported from the White House for the Talon News Service under the name “Jeff Gannon,” announced he was quitting the business “in consideration of the welfare of me and my family.” —White House reporter’s credentials questioned (CNN) Hmm… I interned at a radio station where one of the news reporters went by a…
What is Tenure? (The Good Morning Show — KFAB) This morning at about 8:40, I spent about 12 minutes as a telephone guest on a morning talk show on KFAB in Nebraska, where I was brought in to provide context for the Ward Churchill controversy at the University of Colorado. My role was to explain tenure.…
You arrive for your interview at the most posh hotel in town, where you’re met by the local chapter of Plutocrats R Us — millionaire alumni, billionaire builders, all dropping by on their private jets to meet you. Their female companions, dripping diamonds, whisk your wife off to fashionista spas — while you are wined…
While Churchill has been reviled outside academe, many professors — even those who find his views revolting — have defended him, saying that for a public university to dismiss a tenured professor for his writings would violate the First Amendment and erode the principles of academic freedom. So the debate over Churchill’s research may have…
Many thanks for responding to my brief survey. My name is Ashley Holmes, and I am conducting some descriptive research as part of my M.A. thesis in composition under the direction of Dr. Chris Anson at NC State University. Most of my work has involved collecting and describing cases of blogs used for the teaching…
I used to love routines, particularly the way they allowed life’s more mundane aspects to slip into the background, removed from conscious decision making. Before becoming a dad, my mornings began with a predictable sequence. Coffee. Bagels. NPR. But with a newborn, routines are constantly at risk. You put your hand to her little forehead.…
If you’re designing a website aimed at teenagers, you’d better not make the text too small. That’s not because teens have bad eyes, but because teenagers tend to lean back in their chairs when they’re at their computers. That advice and much more about how websites for teens should be different from those for adults…
I just don’t know what it is about Jerz and Britney. Maybe he is the president of her fan club and he has to donwplay their connection in class because it just would get weird if we knew he loved her like we all do. I mean come on people the world wants to know.…
An overwhelming majority of the students who entered college and the workforce during the past three years said in the survey that, knowing what they know now, they would have worked harder and applied themselves more in high school. More than three-quarters of all graduates not in college (77 percent) and nearly two-thirds of those…
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous subject keeps his youthful looks while the vagaries of age are visited upon his portrait in the attic. Now a digital version of Wilde’s idea is being developed to show you what you will look like in five years’ time if you take no exercise,…
Population decline is by no means restricted to the industrial world. Remarkably, the sharp rise in American fertility rates at the height of the baby boom — 3.8 children per woman — was substantially above Third World fertility rates today. From East Asia to the Middle East to Mexico, countries once fabled for their high…
THE words of Pope John Paul II’s Angelus blessing today were “probably recorded” after his voice faltered when he started to deliver the traditional blessing from his hospital window, Italian media reported. —Pope’s blessing ‘probably recorded’ (The Austrailian) Insert your “Ashely Simpson hoedown” reference here.
There was a little turtle. He lived in a box. He swam in a puddle. He climbed on the rocks. He snapped at a mosquito. He snapped at a flea. He snapped at a minnow. And he snapped at me. He caught the mosquito. He caught the flea. He caught the minnow. But he didn’t…
But political conservatives who read the story were convinced the judge must be a liberal activist intent on being politically correct. On the other hand, liberals said the judge and neighbor must be conservatives, who tend to see “terrorists behind every bush and on every porch,” even in a quiet rural neighborhood just south of…
—Wahoooooo! We’re off and blogging, getting er done! (John Haddad) One of my students demonstrates his enthusiasm for a new semester of blogging.
There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced…
A book with one name on the cover may turn out to have a team of contributors. Most readers may never have pondered the difference, but a history book whose author alone has carried out all of the research and writing is almost always a more dependable work of scholarship than one whose multiple cooks…
The scene: A college classroom at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The subject: Writing the newspaper column. The question: “Can any of you name a columnist you read — in a newspaper or magazine or online — on a regular basis?” In response: Dead silence. […] “My generation is very visually oriented,” explains Ryan Schreiber, a…