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:My contribution to WAOB Audio Theatre’s plan to record all the proverbs.My contribution to WAOB Audio Theatre’s …CultureWe are cruel. We always have been. The Internet did not make us soWe didn’t start the flame war. Scandalou…CultureIn July, 2002, I…

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:The Mom From The Cat in the Hat Finally SpeaksAs a toddler, my son once methodically s…AmusingHow to DisagreeIf we’re all…

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

  Similar:Performing as Alquist in ActIII of Rossum’s Universal Robots. (Free Zoom performance of gr…https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL…PersonalJust an elegant retro keyboard for a #steampunk #cgi project. Procedural materials mean I …AestheticsAnother 10 sq cm of #steampunk #neovictorian control panel. Not the end product. Just prac…AestheticsYes, I do feel rather awesome right now.Lost brand-new earbuds. Reached in pocke…PersonalThe…

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:Monsters are People Too Study used D & D characters to…AcademiaBeatrix Potter-pinching and Žižekian swipes: the strange world of book theftsWe caught a gent last Christmas with £40…BooksNews report from 1981 about the Internet.A human interest story about an early ex…BusinessKing Oberon Midsummer Make-upMidsummer closes tonight, July 23. My da…CultureDuring World War II, Literature Reigned…

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:Your Letters Helped Challenger Shuttle Engineer Shed…

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:Dress rehearsal for Mamma Mia. This weekend only.PersonalImagine a world…PersonalSet design for Acts II and III of R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) #blender3dDesignIn February 2000, I was blogging about "The Heist" (Sorrels); the "Instant Muse Poetry Gen… In February 2000, I was blogging abo…CybercultureDr Jerz I think your microphone glitchedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPqnXF7A…AcademiaA support sloop on deck and…