How Facebook is killing comedy (and other indie content creators)

Facebook has monetized access to online content. The mobile apps make it difficult for you to actually leave Facebook to follow a link, which means Facebook is increasingly showing other people’s content, bypassing the creator’s own ads (and their “subscribe” and “comment” and “contact us” and “archive” buttons). As Internet comedy writer Matt Klinman puts…

A rare win for Dad.

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How Star Wars was saved in the edit

I learned a lot while watching this video. I didn’t realize how much of this movie was driven by off-screen narration. The whole “The Death Star will be in range in five minutes” sequence was added in post. Similar:Former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh sentenced to 3 years for ‘Healthy Holly’ children’s …Former Baltimore Mayor Catherine…

Fie upon your multi-page, ad-stuffed crapfest of shame. (Don’t click!)

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Apology of Socrates, By Plato

Aristotle classified Plato’s work, representing Socrates’s defense against charges that he corrupted the youth of Athens, as a fiction. But what words! What a defense! (“Greatest mind of history / Solving life’s sweet mystery.” —Schwartz) For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your…

Is your child texting about recursive acronym palindromes?

Is your child texting about recursive acronym palindromes? lol = linguists overinterpret lol gtg = gtg tokenizes gatekeeping mcm = man-crush-monday connotes mania wcw = whoever created woman-crush-wednesday brb = befoggedly redefine brb   Similar:Looks like somebody’s webmaster accidentally preloaded a headline that would be easy to ed… Looks like somebody’s webmaster acci…Current_EventsAnnie — Cabinet…

Certainty vs. uncertainty: “In which are we more likely to be deceived, and in which has rhetoric the greater power?”

I’ve taught Plato’s Phaedrus before, but in the past I have mostly focused on brief passages in which the characters discuss writing, which is really just a side issue. The purpose of today is mostly just to accustom my “History and Future of the Book” students to oral classical culture, in the hopes they’ll get…

One of my undergrad lit papers. Dot-matrix printed, with hand-written instructor annotations, c. 1988.

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Socrates envisaged a time when we would forget how to remember.

From Daisy Dunn’s review of Puchner’s The Written World: Socrates envisaged a time when we would forget how to remember. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Indian epic Ramayanahad been preserved through an oral tradition that seemed destined to perish through overreliance on papyrus. Akhmatova remembered because she had to but Socrates simply chose to. He…