Brooke Kile (professional headshot)

Branding Essentials for the English Major: 4 Examples of How to Re-package Your Skills for Employers

It seems every week some “expert” publishes an article lamenting on the fact that if college students want to ensure they can get a good job after graduation, they should steer clear of “worthless” majors. Go into business or technology, say the authors. Stay away from things like English literature or creative writing. This argument comes from the erroneous assumption that a college education is best spent developing a repertoire…

Video-Game Violence Is Now a Partisan Issue

Scholar and essayist Ian Bogost traces the history of video game scapegoating, noting that while the panic used to be bi-partisan, and then-senator Hilary Clinton targeted video games in 2005, now it’s mostly GOP voices who blame video games for violent actions such as mass shootings. (Incidentally, the Va Tech shooter preferred Sonic the Hedgehog, and the Sandy Hook shooter liked Dance Dance Revolution.) In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court…

Why teens need live theater in the age of YouTube

A good article from the Boston Globe. The plays I saw with my dad handed us a script on every uncomfortable topic parents and children both painstakingly avoid and desperately need to discuss. If YouTube’s current teenage audience is anything like my teenage self, they won’t take kindly to their parents telling them to get offline. At that age, my dad disparaging a website I genuinely loved felt like proof…

Twitter and the “Two Minutes Hate”

Another of the many, many reflections on the big story of the weekend. In 1984, George Orwell famously described a totalitarian political order in which people were kept as docile subjects in part by a daily ritual called “Two Minutes Hate” in which the population directs all of its pent up fury at “Goldstein,” a possibly fictional enemy of the state. Thanks to Twitter, we now know that the same dynamic…

1

Hide and Q (TNG Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 9)

Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. The powerful, unpredictable Q conjures a Napoleonic scenario from Picard’s mind and takes the rest of the bridge crew there, leaving Picard on the Enterprise. Memorable not for the fuzzy-faced toy soldiers that get way too much screen time, but for a Shakespeare quote battle between Q and Picard, and Riker’s misplaced magnanimity when given the powers of Q. We’re…

2

Lonely Among Us (TNG Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 6)

Conflict between two species who petition for membership in the Federation turns out to be the B-plot. On its way past a mysterious optical special effect, the Enterprise picks up a strange glowing spark via the sensor array, and as such entities tend to do in Star Trek, it starts wreaking havoc. We get a lot of exterior shots of the ship, some alien character designs that would have worked better in background shots, a glimpse at a sensor relay room we’ve never seen before (though it’s pretty obviously a redress of Engineering), and some glimpses of the Crushers at home.