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:Journalists Verify ClaimsConfirm what your sources tell you. Fact…CultureWhat happened when I showed vintage Mister Rogers to my 21st-century kidsThey discovered TikTok. And Fortnite. An…CultureDead metaphor alert, as far as the Associated Press is concernedOther signs of the digital age:…

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:Fake News Remains Top Industry Concern in 2017“In the past, people fabricated content….CultureReplaying Childhood: On Gifting my Video Games to the…

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:The Pointlessness of UnpluggingWhat sex was for the Puritans, technolog…Current_EventsTerminated for Reading an Allen Ginsberg Poem?In February two students complained abou…CultureCarolyn is in PICT Classic Theatre adaptation of Oliver Twist (opened Sat night, runs thro…[Artistic Director Alan] Stanford had no…BooksIt's “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” 111th birthdayInteresting introduction to the history …BooksElsa at noon. College “Intro to…

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:Masks (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode…

Details from the author’s life are not the magic ticket to “correct” interpretations in literature class

Students who are new to college literature classes often value literary biography very highly, expecting that one of their tasks is to spot one-to-one relationships between the literary texts and the personal lives of the authors. For instance, from the two Sylvia Plath poems that use Nazi imagery to describe troubled relationships with paternal figures,…