A fascinating concept. (Thanks for the suggestion, Mom!) Ever wonder how we ended up with so many different styles of letters? Open any text editor, email client or design app and you will immediately be bombarded with a buffet of typographic choices. Serif or sans serif? Display or text? Classical or contemporary? Formal or casual?…
I really hate that little sparkly icon which reminds me of all the human labor that was stolen to create a product that enriches the tech barons while contributing to the environmental destruction of the planet. I absolutely to NOT want to ask my book questions. I’m reading a book precisely because I want to…
Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts. Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and…
My auditory processing disorder makes it hard for me to process speech when I can’t see the speaker’s lips. My wife is being treated for an ear infection. We are asking each other “What?” after somebody coughs, after we ask each other “What did you say?” and after we answer each other “Never mind.” In…
The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and…
Essays like this remind me why I picked my English major. There are other ways to get facts. Newspapers are full of them, as are podcasts and documentaries. Travel shows proliferate, take your pick. But even then, there is nothing like the view of the world via a novel. Novels can go beyond merely being…
AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable. During a lesson on the Narrative of…
I’m far from perfect, and injustice and suffering and tragedy in the world won’t be much affected by the story I’m about to narrate, but as I was walking in the mall with my son, I dictated a 500-word email response to a student whose paper topic didn’t work out and who asked for my…
When I went off to college to be an English major, my father (who passed last December at 90) told me a story about how his respected professor at Northwestern University spent a whole lecture on the seven levels of symbolism in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Being of an analytical mind and precise mind, my father copied…
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Inspiration can come to those with the humblest heart. Caedmon the Cowherd believed he had no talent for singing, but the voice in his dream encouraged him. Listen to what he does with it in, “The Cowherd Who Became a Poet,” by James Baldwin. A Production of We Are One Body® Audio Theatre. Read by…
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In my lit classes, I’m definitely teaching more short stories and fewer novels that I used to. I’ve expanded the time I spend on note-taking, synthesizing quotes from different sources, and why at the college level it’s not a good paragraph if it simply introduces “One quote that supports my position,” repeats three or four…
This was before the printing press, so books were copied by hand on parchment, which made them expensive and rare. Most people didn’t read much, especially for pleasure. Instead, they listened to books at group readings for entertainment. Pero López de Ayala wrote at the end of the 14th century, “It also pleased me to…
Book historian Irene O’Daly notes that the passage crossed out in a medieval manuscript matches where the scribe accidentally turned two pages while copying out a printed book, showing that manuscript culture continued to exist even after the printing press was introduced. (It’s the third of three examples she uses.) Similar:Arsenal of Freedom (TNG Rewatch,…
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The host was Bill Moyers, former White House press secretary under Lyndon Johnson. The guest was August Wilson, one of the great playwrights of the 20th century and unofficial laureate of African American history and culture. It did not go well. “Don’t you grow weary of thinking Black, writing Black, being asked questions about Blacks?”…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Worf grumbles to Kira that Odo seems permissive about Quark’s shady doings. On a runabout, O’Brien stops himself just before saying he wishes Keiko were more like Bashir. Plot contrivance particles get the runabout crashed on a planet and the spacebros captured by Jem’Hadar ground forces before the opening credits roll. The leader…
Rewatching ST:DS9 On a dark and stormy night, a man gives himself an injection, and a rain-soaked young woman shows up at his door, on a quest to ask the famous writer Jake Sisko why he stopped writing years ago. We flash back to young Jake tagging along on the Defiant ostensibly to see a…
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