Fascinating art history — a thoughtful close reading of a painting. Great example of multimodal journalism. The clouds are heavy and black. A grim day for fighting. In the air is the smell of damp, and mortar fire. It’s a little after 10 a.m. on Sept. 13, 1759. The battle is almost over. In the…
Screeeech . . . hisss . . . squaawk. These are familiar sounds to anyone who’s ever used dial-up internet or called BBSes. It seemed especially noisy late at night. Have you ever wondered why all that noise was necessary? And did you know you could have muted your noisy modem? Source: Why Did Dial-Up…
In November 2000, I was blogging about Ursula K. Le Guin Why we perceive mirrors reversing things left/right but not up/down Pioneering blog Arts & Letters Daily (just a year older than my own blog) Nick Montfort’s constrained poem “Upper Typewriter Row“ The 2000 US Presidential Election controversy (ballot design, hanging chads, recounts, political cartoons)…
Earlier today Trump tweeted that his campaign would hold a “Lawyers Press Conference at Four Seasons, Philadelphia.” He later specified that he didn’t mean the prestigious Four Seasons hotel, but rather an unrelated business “Four Seasons Landscaping,” which happens to be located next to an adult bookstore and near a cremation company. One imagines that…
That moment during McCain’s concession speech in 2008, when he mentions Obama, and a ripple of boos begin. McCain, his face showing disapproval, holds up his hands palms down — a controlling gesture, but a calming one. He says the simple word, “Please,” and patiently waits until his audience settles down. He says he just…
In October 2000, I was blogging about The F. Scott Fitzgerald Short story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (background; full text) A biography of Virginia Woolf The precarious status of English as a global language A call for papers for a special issue of Text Technology devoted to interactive fiction (I have a copy on my shelf…
Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 anti-fascist novel adapted for radio by Berkeley Rep.
I don’t know what this prisoner did, but she sure looks like she existed as a human being, despite laws that defined her as less than human, an animal, and illegal. How dare she! It’s pretty simple when you think about it, isn’t it? If she didn’t want to be arrested, beaten, and executed by…
In September 2000, I was blogging about The nerdy, 3-person 1990 play PICK UP AX The full text of Edward Bellamy’s Utopian fantasy Looking Backward (written in 1888, set in September 2000) The papers of William Butler Yeats (donated by his son to the National Library of Ireland) An elitist press release from Jupiter Communications…
Stunning. The Stars and Stripes is much more important than any local monument. Even for those of us who are all too wearily familiar with President Donald Trump’s disdain for journalists, his administration’s latest attack on the free press is a bit of a jaw-dropper. In a heretofore unpublicized recent memo, the Pentagon delivered an…
In August 2000, I was blogging about Top 10 Tips for Writing Poetry (which I’ve updated over the years and is the most popular page on my site today) Richard Lederer’s presidential wordplay (“I predict that at the end of the campaign. Gore will be bushed and Bush will be gored. Then we’ll have either…
One of the few harsh critics of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which premiered 70 years ago. Mr. Bentley, who was also a playwright, was an early champion of modern European drama in the 1940s but had little use for American plays. Source: Eric Bentley, Critic Who Preferred Brecht to Broadway, Dies at 103
I regularly teach Flannery O’Connor, and assign a whole book of her short stories when I taught an American Lit 1915-Present course. Now that I’m teaching “American Lit 1776-Present” I keep her stories in rotation, but I have more material to cover, so I have to be more selective. O’Connor’s fiction contains many themes and…
Powerful assessment of Donald Trump, written by Peter Wehner, a speechwriter who served Reagan and both Bushes. For context, here’s what Wehner writes about the conservative movement during the Reagan years: The conservative movement in the 1980s, although hardly flawless, was intellectually serious and politically optimistic. And Reagan himself was a man of personal decency,…
Trump really did tweet “This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country!” Plugging those words into Google Translate yields “Dies ist ein Kampf um die Rettung des Erbes, der Geschichte und der Größe unseres Landes!” I could be wrong, but I think Größe in German just means “physical size,”…
I recorded a recitation of the Declaration of Independence for WAOB Audio Theatre last year. They’ve released a remastered version.
