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

What I wrote is not actually a list, just a narrative rant against clickbait listicles. Similar:Yeah natural born creative genius is a cool myth, but have you tried grinding through hour…PersonalMizzou professor who pushed reporter away from protesters is fired“The board believes that Dr. Click’s con…AcademiaPeople hate reading instructions, and will only glance at them…

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:Winky Winky Drudge ReportThe Drudge Report today features an amus…AmusingAstronauts cloaked Klingon space patch: Star Trek-inspired emblem revealed The current commander…

If I am not a pedagogical god, at least my marking app has no ungraded submissions.

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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.

Similar:FULL BLOOM (Aug 31-Sep 2)Personal“The author talks about [topic]” is filler. Your professors want your college-level ideas.AcademiaWhat would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood? @shu_hog… AmusingAt the Johnstown Flood Museum. (May 31 1889 the neglected dam at the South Fork Fishing an…At the Johnstown Flood Museum. (May…

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…

You come very close to successfully combining argument and explication here…

I recently came across a box of old writing, including a binder where I had saved some undergraduate papers.   When returning a Beowulf paper for a Brit Lit survey, my instructor had stapled a page of hand-written notes that began, “You come very close to successfully combining argument and explication here, much closer than…

The Pope’s Prayer for Countering “Fake News”

Today is the feast of St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of journalists. We are sharing a famous prayer that #PopeFrancis has adapted: a prayer to fight #fakenews. If you know a journalist, give them some love today, and feel free to share this prayer. (CNS illustration/Joanna Korhorst) —Catholic News Service Similar:FULL BLOOM at Latrobe’s Olde Main, Aug…