The song “No One Is Alone,” from the musical Into the Woods, always gives me chills. Last year when my daughter was learning it in her voice class, I helped her work through some of the words. While the whole musical has a dark tone that I find comes too close to nihilism, in the context of…
Seton Hill is revamping its freshman writing program, previously implemented as a pair of courses, “Basic Composition” and “Seminar in Thinking and Writing” (STW), and now called “Composition and Culture” (which students can take in one semester or stretch over two). The new design includes more focus on reading, and also seeks to erase what…
Students who work their way up to leadership positions in clubs, get work-study jobs or internships writing press releases or running social media accounts or editing newsletters, who take challenging courses (and do the hard work necessary for getting an A), and who practice writing and talking about what they learn are already demonstrating the…
The world needs well-rounded leaders. A liberal arts degree encourages the kind of critical thinking that breeds managers and CEOs. American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, “they will say, a couple of decades out, that I’m looking for a…
Similar:To DoTo Do (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) 5: …AcademiaMy students were awesome. So many thoughtful final projects. So much growth. A stressful, …PersonalCollege student makes masks for the deaf & hard of hearing Other than one trip to the grocery sto…Current_EventsWhen backwards newbie poets write…PersonalMore #blender3d #cgi practice. Added workstations underneath the chief engineer's sta…PersonalStill More FaceTime…
Similar:This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m… CultureCongrats to all the winners at the Pittsburgh 48 Hour Film Project! Bit-Sized Productions …Bit-Sized Productions was nominated for …ArtEclipse!PersonalQuoth the ramen, "Eat some more!"PersonalShe’s wearing a shirt with a frog. We are in town to see the…
I am in rehearsals to play Oberon in a community theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is a fairy king who manipulates the lives of humans who wander into his realm. I am also playing Dwarf Fortress, an insanely complex game in which the player indirectly manages a community of dwarves. I’ve been surprised by the connections I’ve observed.
This is nerd heaven — a deep analysis of all the text that appears in the 1980s cult science-fiction film Blade Runner. (I really want this typeface to be Caslon, but despite everything else matching nicely, the top of the 6 is just wrong. I can only apologize for the discrepancy.)UPDATE: Several folks have noted in the comments…
Similar:See The Nutcracker!@laurelballetperformingco dancers and full @westmorelandsymphony orches…DanceMaking more retro props for a #blender3d project. The way to get better at a thing is to d…PersonalWhat happened when I showed vintage Mister Rogers to my 21st-century kidsThey discovered TikTok. And Fortnite. An…CultureSynergistic Synthesis XVII Sub B1 Chair by Kenneth SmytheAfter my daughter’s theater workshop, I…
Similar:Wide-angle view of a villain’s secret lair. #blender3dAesthetics"It's called an amphora," the artist says.AestheticsA stranger took this photo of my parents doing their daily crossword together in a cafe.A stranger took this photo of my parents…CultureMy Kids Are Shatner Than MostI passed along to my geeklings an apprec…DramaEquus. Powerful theatre.PersonalAP Style: try to determine, and…
Similar:Summer project: learning the Unity gaming engine.One bedtime about 11 years ago, my 5yo d…PersonalThe Storyteller (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 14) A Bajoran village mystic na…Rewatching ST:DS9 O’Brien tries to we…BusinessHi, I’m the St Joe’s basement doorstop. Let me start your three-day weekend by wrapping my…PersonalSunny but cool. Great day for a long…
Facebook’s video push threatens the edited TV news package as much as it threatens the written word. I’ve definitely noticed a difference in traffic when I post a YouTube video (which generally gets modest attention on FB but often accumulates views over time) vs when I post similar content directly within Facebook (which FB seems…
Language evolves, so oldsters like me should get just used to it, right? Well, langauge was evolving long before “text” was a verb, and that’s exactly the reason why the English of Dickens and Shakespeare and Chaucer looks so different from our ordinary speech. I still use a pay-as-you-go dumb phone, and have to pay…
This is fallout from losing an invasion of privacy lawsuit, filed in the name of wrestler Hulk Hogan and backed by tech investor Peter Thiel (co-founder of Paypal and an early investor and current board member for Facebook, and in his younger days also co-founder of the Stanford Review). Gawker slogan: “Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s…
Saving this for the next time I assign an oral presentation. Now that doesn’t sound important, and it’s not. But if I repeat it three times, I’m making you believe that it is important… Let’s look at a picture of the planet for no reason …. Slowing my speech, lowering the volume of my voice, by…
Good essay by Mikita Brottman. When I read Macbeth for the first time, I understood almost nothing. The play’s immediate subjects (kingship, Scottish history, nations at war) did not engage me, nor did I have any interest in theater. I loved Macbeth not for its story but for its language. I was fascinated by the…
In 1977, when I was about nine, I saw the original Star Wars, and I certainly enjoyed it, but unlike many of my friends, I kept my allegiance to Star Trek — which was on every afternoon in reruns, and was also available as an animated series, novels, comic books, etc. My fourth-grade classmate Dean…
Funny and clever. Via Excuse the Bananas “Confessions Of An Angst-Ridden Sailor Who Took Out His Emotions On The Wrong Bird” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge “13 Ways To Have No Chill When It Late At Night & You Lonely AF” by Edgar Allan Poe “This Tyger Is Way Too Turnt” by William Blake “3 Foods…
It’s a little bit shallow and solipsistic to say a liberal arts degree is valuable because it can make you a better Borg drone in the technohive, but this guy seems to mean well. Most liberal arts degrees encourage a well-rounded curriculum that can give students exposure to programming alongside the humanities. Philosophy, literature, art,…
The Selfish Gene is a brilliant phrase. It’s also accurate, so long as you realise that “selfish” doesn’t mean selfish, “gene” doesn’t mean gene, and the definite article is a bit of an abstraction. But taken as the literal truth, it’s about as much use as “In the beginning was the word”. Given Dawkins’s hostility…