On a balmy morning in June, Rebecca Miller, a petite 26-year-old actress and Brown University graduate, was perched on a wooden bench in the East Village, just a block from the apartment she shares with her fiancé, a theater director, and two cats. By the looks of her outfit, she was firmly grounded in the…
“You know, they’re not that bad, but they were meant to be private. And it is making me feel very vulnerable that the entire country has to see them now because of this situation.” —Miss N.J. releases blackmail photos (MSNBC) Amy Polumbo, the 22-year-old Miss New Jersey, says she had put the photos on a password-protected…
The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of…
—What People are Doing [US Social Networking Sites] (Businessweek) An interesting, but not very well-sourced graphic, that shows 70% of youth (ages 18-21) are members of social networks, but only 37% create content on those sites. (I’m not sure what the researchers count as “creating content” — there’s a separate column for “Critics” who comment on…
Not knowing what they could and should do to plan for the future was a constant refrain among the undergrads. Whether or not college faculties and administrators are comfortable acknowledging that a majority of students have enrolled because of their belief that a college degree will lead to an attractive and secure career, the fact…
—Lego White and Nerdy (YouTube) Weird Al’s awesome “White and Nerdy” has spawned not just one but several different Lego versions (of various quality levels).
Q: What do you come across when you get a planet with antlers? A: Uran-moose! My five-year-old daughter made up that joke in the car this afternoon. I helped her a bit with the set-up. Her first version was, “What do you come across when you get Uranus with antlers?”
Born July 24, 1914, Mirvish took over his father’s grocery store at 15 and eventually came to amass an enterprise that includes Mirvish Village, the Princess of Wales Theatre, the Royal Alexandra Theatre and the Old Vic Theatre in London. —Entrepreneur and theatre impresario Mirvish dead at 92 (Canada.com) Honest Ed’s was a Toronto landmark, well…
Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses within the next five years. * User-Created Content. It’s all about the audience, and the “audience” is no longer merely listening. User-created content is all around us, from blogs and photostreams to wikibooks and machinima clips. Small…
Schwartz is describing how the two main characters in the student film will sit on a couch, simultaneously reach for popcorn and inadvertently touch hands, when Kit Reiner of Silver Spring and Max Simon of Potomac — both 18 — cry out, “Just like in ‘Lady and the Tramp’!” And Schwartz could take it no…
We thought our “Pimp my Book Cart” contest was a funny idea that would spawn a dozen or so entries. But it seemed to spark something, and we started hearing from folks all over the country. It even spawned a “Pimp my Book Trolley” contest Down Under in Australia (we’re judging that one too). Still,…
“The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags,” says Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University and one of the organisers of this year’s International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. “These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost…
Sites like the Blake archive mark an important point of departure from expensive clothbound volumes available in university libraries — and unique items in private collections — to high-resolution facsimiles freely available to anyone with Internet access. Even the nonspecialist (like me) can easily spend hours appreciating Blake’s aesthetic achievement beyond reading the unadorned transcriptions…
‘One approach to seeing the future is through scenarios — carefully crafted “what if?” stories that let us imagine several different outcomes’, the book says. It suggests holding a ‘scenario party’ (seriously) where you can ‘pool the imaginations and experiences of your friends’. In short: we have no idea what the future will look like,…
W. R. Hearst, New York Journal, N.Y.: “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return. “Remington.” “Remington, Havana: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. “W. R. Hearst.” —Not likely sent: The Remington-Hearst ”telegrams” (W. Joseph Campbell, PhD | Journalism and Mass Communication…
If I’m working on a project, it’s my dream. I’m not toiling away in a dank quarry, hauling blocks across miles of boiling sand to build someone else’s pyramid. If you’re going to grind your life away in a masochistic profession – and make no mistake, game development is unadulterated masochism – I say to…
RUR Cats (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My first (and probably only) contribution to the LOLCats meme. In the 1920s, the Czech play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) introduced the world to a word that quickly displaced older terms such as “automaton.” As author Karel Capek was working out the plot, he fretted that calling them “labori” would be…
It isn’t clear whether Linden Lab simply took the Woodbury island offline, or actually destroyed the software behind it. Dori Littell-Herrick, an assistant professor and chairwoman of the animation department, said she believed it was the latter. If so, the university would need to build another island if it re-established a presence in Second Life.…
It feels somewhat ungrateful to complain in today’s television environment, with so many well-written, superbly acted shows available, that the screen is destroying the page. But it’s true, especially if you pause to consider that reading fiction is something that requires time, time away from a screen. More and more, though, Americans don’t have the…
They were surprised when a magazine article asserted that women use an average of 20,000 words per day compared with 7,000 for men. If there had been that big a difference, he thought, they should have noticed it. They found that the 20,000-7,000 figures have been used in popular books and magazines for years. But…