In October, 2002, I was blogging about The stupidity of explosions in space movies The Chronicle of Higher Education rescues the briefly defunct Arts & Letters Daily The superiority complex An anti-telemarketing script An “I Love Lucy: bible study Why whitespace matters when creating a sign The coming air age of 1955 (as envisioned in…
Do the headlines encourage empathy, or do they “other” the victims of crime? (Click to zoom in.)
An amazing story of hope and dignity. That book club helped the inmates develop their analytical and communication skills. And out of that came a surprising insight: prison inmates read 9 times more books than civilians. So together with the National Justice Council, the Carambaia publishing house created a program called The Prison Reviews. The…
Police chief and writer Cliff Couch knows his audience. In a paragraph from an article advising LEOs how to deal with reporters, Couch begins with context he assumes his readers already accept, and carefully moves from there to the new ideas he wants them to consider. The horror tales you may have heard about reporters…
In September, 2002, I was blogging about “The Science of Scientific Writing” (1990) from ‘pong’ to ‘pac man’ Michigan Police fall for The Onion satire about terrorist telemarketers “Ebonics” (ebony + phonics) Silly alarmist story about recessive blonde genes A scientist undone by plagiarism Google News (when it was new) Mel Gibson’s plan to film…
From October: A man who was arrested over a Facebook parody aimed at his local police department is trying to take his case to the Supreme Court. He has sought help from an unlikely source, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Monday. –The New York Times,Area Man Is Arrested for Parody. The Onion Files a…
In August, 2002, I was blogging about Educational technology spending that doesn’t benefit students; ebook readers that students don’t like; email as a tool in online course (all free at the time, but now behind the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s paywall) A prof spreading bad papers in order to catch plagiarists Expensive goose tracker leads…
“[Police] will lie to you about what crime they are actually investigating,” Duane writes in his book, “whether they regard you as a suspect, whether they plan to prosecute you, what evidence they have against you, whether your answers may help you, whether your statements are off the record, and whether the other witnesses have…
In the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections, the message from Fox News was clear: violent crime is surging, cities are dangerous hellscapes and Democrats are responsible. With the vote over, however, the rightwing news channel appeared to decide things weren’t that bad after all, and decreased its coverage of violent crime by 50% compared…
In April, the FBI raided an ABC journalist’s apartment. James Gordon Meek abruptly resigned, and his former colleagues say they haven’t seen him for months. Rolling Stone just broke this story. Multiple sources familiar with the matter say Meek was the target of an FBI raid at the Siena Park apartments, where he had been living on…
If you’ve been following the sad story of Elijah McClain, a Black man who went into cardiac arrest and died in police custody in a Denver suburb in 2019 (after telling the officers who were arresting them that he was unarmed, that he doesn’t even kill flies, and that he loved them) you might know…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark scowls as a lucky customer cleans up at a dabo table. Jake blows a kiss at the attendant, who must be Mardah, his girlfriend (of whom we have heard but never seen). Mardah encourages the customer to play one more round, which he loses. He aims to console himself with Marda’s attention,…
The Drudge Report is pulling no punches as it covers the Trump document saga. Backstory: In 1998, Drudge went public with word that Newsweek was sitting on a story about an intimate relationship between President Clinton and 24-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Hilary Clinton’s defense of her husband, as she appeared at his side…
One day earlier in the summer I visited the studio for a couple of hours and churned out three or four recordings. Here is one of them.
In sync with the resurgence of labor activism nationwide, actors, dancers, stage managers, technicians and others have been questioning the nuts and bolts of their contracts — both the documents that detail their jobs and the wider assumptions about what they owe an audience. Can the theater, they ask, find a way to uphold them…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Sisko is unimpressed by Jake’s botany science project, and offers to take him on a vacation through the wormhole to do a planetary survey, proving he’s learned absolutely nothing from O’Brien’s attempt to take a runabout on a vacation. Space Dad is flummoxed when Space Son announces he’s invited Nog to come along,…
Rewatching ST:DS9 O’Brien annoys everyone in Ops with last-minute instructions. On his way to join Keiko on a runabout for their vacation, he runs into a former shipmate from the Rutledge. Boone says he’s left Starfleet and is now settled on the Cardassian side of the demilitarized zone. The two promise to check up with…
Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average…
A shot of Kim Kardashian leaning against an Egyptian coffin at the 2018 Met Gala by Landon Nordeman exposes his subject in a flash of light—though perhaps not the subject anyone expected. Out of the thousands upon thousands who saw the shot, one happened to be more interested in the gold coffin than Kim’s (heavenly) body in…
A few years ago I was working regularly with a director who filled any conversation pause with a descending musical vocalization “doo de-doo de-doo.” While the similar “dum de-dum de-dum” means “I’m just sitting here minding my own business,” the brighter, more cheerful “doo de-doo de-do” was a cross between a satisfied sigh and a…