https://youtu.be/tOYQc8vByoY Similar:Yes, we will see almost anything branded Sherlock Holmes.PersonalI'm nerdy enough to give my 15yo a used copy of "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." I’m nerdy enough to give my 15yo a used …BooksRecording Christmas Stories for WAOB Audio TheatreFor WAOB Audio Theater, my family spent …PersonalIt's a lie that having zero assignments…
We just bought a new refrigerator from our local Sears. As a kid, I remember circling toys I wanted in the Christmas catalog. Pages of Legos, Matchbox cars, sleeping bags, remote-controlled cars. There might have been no Sears at all if Richard Sears, a 19th-century railway agent, hadn’t received an unwanted shipment of watches. He…
Similar:The daughter looks stunning in pink. AestheticsMore Adventures in Suburban AdultingAbout four years ago I bought an electri…CultureJesus Christ SuperstarI have a daughter who does things. Her n…CultureThe girl as Gimli, Legolas, Aragorn and Thorin. #proudofthegirl #notentirelysurewhy #still…AestheticsModular components to mix and match. The upper storeys are next. #blender3d #medievalyork …Modular components to mix and…
Making this illustration in Blender3D was almost as much fun as voicing the role of Electron Jones. This was my first project using the Cycles rendering engine. In the first episode of “Electron Jones,” the narrator describes looking down on a “levi-train” as a lunar transport takes off into the twilight sky in the futuristic…
An important but small detail in a Blender3D project I just finished is this trench-coated character. I started with a clip-art silhouette, but it looked pretty drab. Thanks to a little pixel-doctoring in The GIMP, I touched up the center image. The schlubby pant cuffs on this guy don’t fit the character, so I smoothed…
As the hoaxers explained in Areo, they targeted fields they pejoratively dub “grievance studies” — “gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy” — which they consider peculiarly susceptible to fashionable nonsense. Does the hoax identify something uniquely rotten in gender and sexuality studies, or could…
The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences… The trio say they’ve proved that higher ed’s fixation on identity politics enables “absurd and horrific” scholarship. Their submissions were outlandish—but no more so, they insist, than others written in earnest and published by these journals.
Gender, Place & Culture, for instance, published a 2017 paper that wasn’t a hoax analyzing the “feminist posthumanist politics” of what squirrels eat. This year Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy, published an analysis of a one-woman show featuring “the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat.” The performance supposedly offers “a synthaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychological fallout.”
More than half of the hostile responses to The Last Jedi, episode eight of the Star Wars saga, were politically motivated trolling or the result of non-human bot activity, according to an academic paper published by a US digital media expert. Morten Bay, a research fellow at the University of Southern California (USC), analysed Twitter activity about the…
Flight 93 crash site and Tower of Voices. Well worth the side trip on the way back from a weekend gig. I had to explain to the girl why the 9/11/2001 newspaper in the exhibit didn’t mention the attacks (it had been printed overnight). She was especially moved by the recorded messages left by some…
The girl performed musical commercials for a fund-raiser in the Laurel Highlands. On the way back we stopped at a Denny’s, and after I paid the bill the waitress said she was impressed to see a teenaged girl enjoying an outing with her father without having a phone glued to her hand. (Carolyn had just…
Who, I thought, besides a multidisciplinary team in search of research funding, could possibly imagine that a digital account of the impact of reading digital print on human cognition would be effective? For such an account rests on the supremacy of the very thing it seeks to counteract, which can be summarized as a view of the human mind/brain that is itself computational in form.
There are ways to raise a child’s test scores that have nothing to with helping that child learn. In the past 10 years I have seen far more students — even the most capable, most brilliant students — paralyzed with fear about grades. In high school, you got good grades if you followed instructions and…
I am not particularly into anime, though when I was about 12 I was entranced to run across episodes of Star Blazers that aired on my local TV station one summer at about 7am. Having said that, I found this trailer for a (theoretical) anime reworking of Star Wars very appealing. Similar:Equus. Powerful theatre.PersonalAlike (2015)This…
Similar:Imagine a world…PersonalTo all these tools I've loved before…While cleaning out my desk at home I add…Aesthetics‘Broken Age’ ReviewThis will be my self-reward when I finis…CybercultureThere, in my morning snapshot of the kids home-schooling in the kitchen, is the cable I sh…EducationMe, contemplating the implications of maybe doing a socialize this weekend.PersonalThe truth hits Thorvald.…
The New York Public Library has a program that lets youths check out briefcases, handbags, and neckties for job interviews or other formal occasions.
Transcript: Me: (Starts writing a routine email for textbook adoption committee.) Me: (Accidentally paraphrases part of Roy Batty’s “Tears in rain” monologue.) Me: (Checks IMDB to refresh my memory of the full quote.) Me: (Checks Blade Runner Wiki to confirm umlaut in Tannhäuser Gate.) Me: (Looks up Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser.) Me: What, what was…
As circulation has declined, local newspapers have had to adjust for the loss in revenue, sometimes by shrinking the size of their staffs, sometimes by selling out or closing up shop all together.
It’s a myth that humanities majors don’t care about post-graduation employment. What changed was the safety valve of subsequent law school enrollment.
Law school was long the default post-graduation plan for majors in qualitative fields. As long as you had the prospect of a lucrative legal career after college, you could safely major in English or poli sci. Those students didn’t ignore the vocational imperative; they just postponed it. And for a long time, that worked pretty well.
But the Great Recession, combined with AI and offshoring, did a number on law as a career option.
The Cask of Amotillado (read by Dennis Jerz, for WAOB Audio Theatre) Similar:Inequity and BYODIf we are really wanting to help these k…CultureI am very happy for these folks, who spent 20 or so years tweaking an insanely complex, co… AwesomeSet design for Acts II and III of R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) #blender3dDesign10 top writing…
This is an important time to teach people what journalists do and why it matters. “The media” is much larger than “journalists devoted to the objective coverage of the news.” If you don’t like the slant, or the shallowness, or the opportunism of the media you run across, then check out several different sources, including…