Instead of flagging links to questionable news items, Facebook will instead hide them. Which is nice, but it still means we have to trust the algorithm Facebook uses. (Don’t trust Facebook to filter your news for you.) False news undermines the unique value that Facebook offers: the ability for you to connect with family and…
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No spoilers here. (I managed to avoid all spoilers, and hadn’t even seen the trailer. I did see still pics of porgs, though, and I knew the name of the character the StarWars Bros were hating on, so thank you to everyone who did their part to keep the secrets.) No intellectual critical distance for…
In the bird-flight simulator at the Pittsburgh Aviary, the girl twists and turns, careening around buildings, dive-bombing alleyways, and comes to a perfect landing in the middle of the street just as her timer runs out. The boy immediately heads up to clear the buildings, then flies toward the horizon to see how far he…
Pope Francis recently addressed Italian journalists: Your voice, free and responsible, is fundamental for the growth of any society that wishes to be called democratic, so that the continuous exchange of ideas and a profitable debate based on real and correctly reported data can be guaranteed. In our time, often dominated by the anxiety of…
If you were this person’s attorney, you’d probably want this social media blurb phrased a little differently. The headline attached to the story is clearer. Yes, the social media blurb is shorter, but I’d rather cut the “Twp” and make room for the unambiguous “and.” Derry man accused of assaulting female witness and attorney jailed…
Right now, I’m teaching “American Lit 1915-Present” for the last time. It’s the companion course to “American Lit 1800-1915,” which I’ll also never teach again. They are required courses for English majors who need to cover American Lit, but they were also designed to serve as electives. My colleagues and I have trouble covering the depth that we know our English majors need, without overwhelming students who are just looking to sample a bit of AmLit to fulfill a course requirement. So we’ve revamped both these courses, starting next fall. One new course will be “American Lit 1776-Present,” which will obviously cover fewer works than we can fit into 2 terms, but the benefit is we can be confident that any student who’s taken the course will have a clearer understanding of the scope of American literature. Another new course will be “Topics in American Literature,” which will allow us to go into some depth, without needing to cover a little bit of everything. I’m thinking of picking the focus “Literature and Government,” which could include “Rip Van Winkle,” All the King’s Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Invisible Man (Ellison, not H.G. Wells) and Farhenheit 451.
“If you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press… And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.” — Republican Senator John McCain, in a Feb 2017 interview on…
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This clever freshman writing student created a project in Texture, which is designed for branching narratives (such as the Choose Your Own Adventure stories). In the next few screens, he put up nodes showing older and more recent writing samples, asked me to choose which one showed the better writing technique, and gave me feedback…
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I haven’t taught a developmental course at SHU, but when I teach freshman writing, I often encounter students who struggle with the transition from high school to college writing. Those who were praised all their lives as good writers can tell good personal stories, and they can deploy accurate summaries of non-controversial, “correct” facts. I give…
Saturday, Donald Trump tweeted that he knew Flynn lied, and that’s why he “had to fire” him. Critics immediately raised concerns, noting that if Trump did in fact know Flynn had lied, then Trump’s request that FBI Director James Comey “let this go” amounts to an obstruction of justice. Sunday, Trump’s lawyer John Dowd told…
Pop quiz for public relations 101. Scenario 1: You run a wildly popular app that incorporates video with a live host. You learn that a reporter is writing a personality profile of your host. Do you offer some cheerful quotes and then make a note to get your host to sign a new contract that handles…