About to DM a journalism class role-playing exercise. Surprises coming!

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Journalists write to inform, not to impress.

Sometimes when I find myself putting more than a usual amount of creativity into a comment on a student paper, I take a break from churning through papers to make another meme.

Vulcan mind-melds from Star Trek: The Original Series, in the order that I can think of them…

With Dr. Simon Van Gelder in Dagger of the Mind the Horta in Devil in the Dark; mirror Spock melds with McCoy in Mirror Mirror with Nomad the floating space probe in The Changeling. Kinda sorta with random guard (remotely projects the vague idea that the prisoners have escaped, so not really a meld) in……

A Simple Plot for a Literature Review

There are two things you need any time you are stuck in writing. You need to set the course and steady the course. If you are stuck while writing a literature review, then each of these things– set the course and steady the course– have particular ways in which you can do them easily, and…

A Grave Tale (a short story I narrated for WAOB Audio Theatre)

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Fake News Remains Top Industry Concern in 2017

“In the past, people fabricated content. There were ‘midnight flyers,’ which were pieces of propaganda usually sent out by candidates and put on the windshield of your car or under your door at home. And there were forms of content that contained serious misinformation in them. Sometimes they looked news-like and sometimes they didn’t,” explains…

The Mere Presence of Your Smartphone Reduces Brain Power, Study Shows

The researchers found that participants with their phones in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk, and they also slightly outperformed those participants who had kept their phones in a pocket or bag. The findings suggest that the mere presence of one’s smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive functioning,…

Donald Trump’s chilling escalation of his war with the media

A journalist’s response to President Trump’s early morning caps-imbued assault on the FAKE news media. Let’s be clear about what Trump is suggesting here. He wants the Senate intelligence committee to open an investigation into the “Fake News Networks” to get to the bottom of why so much of the news is “just made up.”…

How We Found Tom Price’s Private Jets

Great behind-the-scenes story of the hard work that went into breaking the Tom Price private travel story. The first tip came from a casual conversation with a source back in May: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was using private jets for routine travel, possibly in violation of federal travel rules that allowed such flights…

Backstage with the White Swan and her prince.

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Russian Grand Ballet Swan Lake.

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Half of my students have never read Hamlet. (I told them not to get too attached to any of the characters.)

We focused just on Act I today — the opening scene on the battlement, the initial court scene that introduces Claudius and Gertrude, the domestic scene where Ophelia gets mansplaining first from her brother then from her father, and Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost. After the slow opening acts in A Comedy of Errors, The…

British Politician begins reciting colonial-era Kipling poem in in Myanmar temple

After the UK ambassador cut off his recitation of a pro-colonial Kipling poem in a Maynmar temple, UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson said, “No? Good stuff.” The foreign secretary has been accused of “incredible insensitivity” after it emerged he recited part of a colonial-era Rudyard Kipling poem in front of local dignitaries while on an…

Carolyn and Nick in Beauty and the Beast

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Teaching the First Amendment Freedoms

In an opening lecture, I briefly listed the five freedoms Americans are guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Then I moved on. I quizzed them the next week, and they didn’t do too well. They did a little better when I surprised them with a follow-up quiz. After that,…

Inverted Pyramid: A news story starts with what’s most important, not with whoever spoke first at the event you’re covering.

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Who cares about hyphens, commas and capital letters? You should.

You’re a busy editor, fighting a deadline. Two submissions arrive in your email. One is brilliant but full of grammatical errors and style inconsistencies. You’d have to spend an hour fixing it up. Another submission is just okay, but it’s ready to go. Which would you publish? I often encounter students who’ve been told all…

The girl rehearsing as Babette in Stage Right’s Beauty and the Beast

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Reception after faculty workshop. #partylikeaprofessor

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In Which I Bow Before the Mistress of Teen Snark

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