That’s the story that’s been set up for the player to experience, and he travels along that path like a tourist on a Disneyland ride. However much choice the player seems to have in between these story checkpoints, the overall path of the game is geometrically equivalent to those of film or theater or books.…
A journalism student at NYU published a Generation Y-ney piece on PBS’s MediaShift. The first thing I notice when I walk into the class is that there are 14 girls and two boys. Already NYU is dominated by females, but the journalism department is exceptionally estrogen-infested. Professor Quigley begins by explaining how blogs are becoming…
I’m teaching a 200-level “Writing for the Internet” class, with students ranging from seniors to first-semester freshmen. Our opening unit is on social, academic, and professional conventions, foregrounding the fact that the internet on which young people play and learn is the same internet in which the adults in their lives are teaching and working…
I remember the Biden law school incident. Not long after that, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, I remember reading that law school students were secretly photocopying homework assignments submitted by their arch enemies, in the hopes of one day using that information to torpedo a big political appointment. By choosing Joe Biden as his running…
Our provost sent this link to English faculty members this morning. One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. “The reason for studying fiction escapes me,” he wrote. “Why…
Interesting observations on the internet’s response to the death of Randy (“The Last Lecture”) Pausch. You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets…
I tell my free-verse-loving creative writing majors that Picasso learned to paint traditional portraits before he chose to put two eyes on one side of a figure’s nose. Likewise, learning the traditional rules of grammar will make your writing more powerful, since if you choose to ignore a convention, it will be a deliberate action,…
You won’t find this sort of thing on the TV news shows. Stanley Fish: Milton’s poetry never lets you relax. Even when one of the famous similes wanders down what appears to be a desultory path of mythical allusions and idealized landscapes, it always returns you in the end to the moral perspective that had…
I just saw Wall-E with the family. It’s rare for me to suggest that we all go see a movie — my wife is the cinema buff. But I had read outstanding reviews, and it is a Pixar film, so I went in with high expectations, and was satisfied. It didn’t knock my socks off;…
Wilfred M. McClay: The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual finger-painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject…
From MetaFilter, which is better known as a link filter, comes this detailed story about one small but important part of the Battle of Gettysburg. They smash into the oncoming lines and stop the Southern charge, but their success proves their undoing. As they push the center of the rebel lines back, the wings enfold…
Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic: As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation….…
As long as those pesky neighborhood kids stay off of Joseph Epstein’s lawn, the rest of us can read his Weekly Standard essay about the generation gap in education. I went to a Catholic high school, where I figured out that the whole point of requiring uniforms and “Yes, Sister… No, Sister” was to give…
Boston Globe: Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition – no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, “the natural history of our species” is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and…
A thoughtful post about the fate of film criticism. Much of this boils down what happens when film criticism leaves the world of print journalism and adapts to the TV — not only in the content of the review but the context of celebrity/insider/gossip in which movies are presented to the public. (Armond White, New…
Tomorrow is the last day of classes, but it’s not too late to bring up a new topic. Many of my students in “Intro to Literary Study” were fascinated by Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, so I thought they might appreciate hearing about Card’s dismissal of J.K. Rowling’s suit against a fan-created reference work devoted…
The Weekly Standard does not like The Newseum. Our terrific country offers lots of ways to make a living, but with the possible exceptions of movie acting and architecture, only modern journalism would have the nerve to celebrate itself with something as gaudy and improbable as the Newseum. Similar:And yes, that's her picture in the…
A good analysis from Cory Doctorow: Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there’s…
The New Yorker discusses the fate of print news: Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of…
The Times Online has a story about children’s non-profits that are seeking to ban potential employers from checking social profile websites as part of the job application process. I would agree that what a child posts at age 14 is probably not relevant to a job he or she might want to get at age…