Lighten Up (an illustrator explores the racial politics of skin color in comics)

Lighten Up — The Nib — Medium. Similar:The ‘Liar’s Dividend’ is dangerous for journalists. Here’s how to fight it.  The Liar’s Dividend suggests tha…CultureIs Google Making Us Stupid?Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic: As the …BooksTeaching “The Odyssey” at San QuentinThe opening of “The Odyssey” describes O…BooksHong Kong: journalist permanently blinded in one eye amid increased…

Unpopular grammar rules

Language is a fluid, living social construct. The rules of grammar were not carved on stone tablets and handed down by God. They were created by human beings who had observations about how language works, and opinions about how it should work. “Subject pronoun,” “predicate nominative,” and the like are almost insider terms, ones that…

They called it a “flashlight” because early handheld lights weren’t designed to shine steadily

A student’s short story featuring a treasure hunt at an ancestral mansion uses a vintage name for the mistress of the house a vintage name and supplies a butler, suggesting a Victorian Engliand setting. But the story also used the term “flashlight” — an Americanism for what the Brits are more likely to call an “electric…

Reflections on Flannery O’Connor’s “The River”

I’m teaching “The River” today in an “Introduction to Literary Study” course. Demonstrating that we know what to do if we ever encounter such a little boy in real life won’t help us to understand O’Connor’s literary accomplishment. From a Catholic perspective, the mysteries of God are beyond anyone’s understanding. Anyone who prays for God…

We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.

A chemist celebrates the liberal arts. Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art and science, one that did not exist for innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs. Leonardo’s curiosity and passion for painting, writing, engineering and biology helped him triumph in both art and science; his study of anatomy and dissections…

The Alot is Better Than You at Everything

There is no Englilsh word “alot.” That is, there wasn’t, until this cartoonist created an imaginary beast who could help make sense of all the sentences that use the non-word “alot” (instead of “a lot”). Hyperbole and a Half: The Alot is Better Than You at Everything. Similar:The Maquis, Part 1 (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season…

Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job

The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, a task the San Francisco-based nonprofit has tirelessly done since 1996, two years before Google was founded. The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web. For most people, it ends there. But that’s barely scratching the surface.…