What is with the five-year-old photo illustrating this story that was published yesterday? That Kindle is ancient. Born digital describes works that are created with a computer and are meant to be read on the computer. They’re not works that you print out. The computational aspect of the work is part of its aesthetic and…
I have recently started managing the Facebook page for a local arts nonprofit. Tracking the number of views, likes, and shares generated by the items I post has been a lot of fun. I’ve definitely played fewer rounds of Civilization as a result of doing more Facebook page management. The recent experience means I am…
Yet though it’s widely celebrated, The Hobbit’s always kind of existed in the shadow of Tolkien’s other great work, The Lord of the Rings. Corey Olsen, self-described “Tolkien professor,” tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered, that Tolkien fans tend to fall in love with The Hobbit as children, then move on…
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Bernstein recognizes the affect that difficulty first releases — anxiety, reluctance, the deep breath as one gathers resolve to do something difficult, such as read a poem known for its difficulty. His performance includes several masks, switching the impression to a generic Dr. Phil (“Difficult poems are not like this because of something you as…
“But I’m going to be a video game designer!” protests one of my Grade 10 English students. “I don’t need to be able to read novels or write essays.” The way the game is rigged right now, in order to gain admission to a reputable video game design program in a traditional post-secondary institution, one…
Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle transformed an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, into a 124,500-square-foot public library, the largest single-floor public library in the United States. The design won the International Interior Design Association’s 2012 Library Interior Design Competition. MSR stripped out the old ceiling and walls of the building, gave the perimeter walls and bare warehouse ceiling…
In 1812 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published Children’s and Household Tales in the German region of Westphalia and its influence slowly spread all over the world. The Grimms’ book, which they updated in their lifetime, is the second bestselling book in the German language after the Bible. While many in Britain will have first experienced…
I’m generalising wildly, of course, but journalists – particularly student journalists – often try to learn programming from books. That may sound like common sense, but it’s not in an art or a science – and programming is both. Programmers – if I’m to generalise wildly again – typically combine books (which they don’t read…
My 10yo has a complex relationship with books. She loves being read to, and she reads quite a lot, but she says she doesn’t enjoy reading. Of the various lessons she has to accomplish each day, she will often choose reading first, but only, she says, because she hates it least. Today when I finished…
There’s often a moment in a lit class when a student says, “Since the professor says there’s no single ‘correct’ interpretation of a story, then pretty much anything goes, so I’m going to argue ‘Huck was a girl’ or ‘Hester was a witch.’ ” Of all the possible “correct” answers, the stronger ones are better…
A long-time fan of Edith Nesmit recounts what it was like to be asked to write a sequel. I was flattered to be asked but initially declined: I felt it would be restricting to try to write in another author’s style, especially if they were writing long ago. I did say, just to sound obliging,…
I haven’t taught a technical writing course in a while… I was thinking of offering it again sometime soon, so I was happy to see the recommendations on the rhet-comp making list, Rhonda McCafferty: There are also good excerpts in David R. Russell’s *Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History*. The second edition was published…
Dickens is so brilliant a stylist, his vision of the world so idiosyncratic and yet so telling, that one might say that his subject is his unique rendering of his subject, in an echo of Mark Rothko’s statement, “The subject of the painting is the painting”—except of course, Dickens’s great subject was nothing so subjective…
The other day, my wife suggested a Carnegie Science Center-related post. Only once before — in 2003 — has she volunteered a topic like that, so I took her up on the offer. I’ve noticed that, on every trip to the CSC, my wife slips away to browse the museum store while I’m watching the…
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Today, I managed to get in a couple of hours of web development and PR/social media work that is stretching my skills a bit. The new pack of iPad styluses I ordered from Amazon has shipped. I’m caught up in the online faculty development class I’m taking. My inbox is brimming with opportunities to collaborate and connect…
Kierkegaard recognized, over 150 years ago, that we live life forward but we understand it backward. He was speaking about our being immersed in time itself: The simple truth that we live our present moments in a sort of confusion continuously being clarified by the retrospective understanding that comes later. Most novelists work to soften…