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:So peaceful and majestic. Another outing with my son.PersonalAwesome 1935 Soviet Movie Deploys Saxophone-Controlled Robots to Crush Tophat- and Bowler-…I wish I understood Russian, so that I c…AestheticsMother 3: My Mom, and MeThoughtful, powerful, personal analysis …AestheticsHow To Escape The…

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:My 4Cs StoryI chaired a session on Friday, and gave …AcademiaExplaining Twerking to Your ParentsI still haven’t seen the video, but…

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

  Similar:My Anti-Linkbait Pledge: Cynical Overhyping vs. Simply Being OnlineWhen I find something interesting that a…CultureMore bits of my summer project – another delightful span of a #neovictorian #steampunk con…AestheticsBlender 3D Flyover of Fantasy Steampunk Spacecraft When my kids were small, at bedtime …AestheticsOh that sweet, sweet feeling of progress.PersonalIn September, 2000, I was blogging…

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 Enemy (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season Three, Episode 7) — LaForge and a Romulan Cooperate to …Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….EthicsThe Myth of ‘Learning Styles’The discourse around “learning styles” (…AcademiaYour Brain Does Not Work Like a ComputerThe brain-as-computer is a powerful meme…HealthThe ‘Little Free Library’ arrives in the D.C. areaThe “Little Free Library” concept starte…AmusingParents…

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:Syllabusing Like a BossAcademiaWhat Can Science Tell…

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,…

My schedule every Friday this term. (Payback for teaching a course over Christmas break.)

  Similar:My Son Plays Mozart Too Fasthttps://youtu.be/gXAtRI1NLxs He says “M…AmusingMy second greenscreen test.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d-LPwKQ…CybercultureThose shoggoths hacked from lungs unspeakable1) Last night, I’m fairly certain some …AmusingOh the Overthinks You Can Overthink: Horton the Elephant, the Wickersham Brothers, and Mas…Yesterday, I performed in a school matin…AcademiaMaking progress.PersonalServing at Christmas on the Hill 2025Personal