Over the past four centuries, the brutality of Shakespeare’s plays has become the subject of endless academic study, but his contemporary critics didn’t approve of the on-stage gore. Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute, said that Elizabethan drama was known for being gruesome: “The English drama was notorious for on-stage deaths; they were thought crass.…
Similar:The daughter is doing another thing, this time in Galway, Ireland. AestheticsI get a little workplace gift as the academic year closes.I get a little workplace gift as the aca…PersonalAnd now that June’s almost over, it’s time to start prepping for the fall term. (Sigh.)PersonalThoreau's Cellphone ExperimentWhen I teach “Intro to Literary Study,” …AcademiaIf…
For WAOB Audio Theater, my family spent an afternoon recording “The Little Match Girl,” “Papa Panov’s Special Day,” and a new story, “The Executioner.” Already online — Ozma and the Little Wizard, and The Monkey’s Paw. Similar:Looking in on the officers' wardroom (conference and dining) one deck above the main … I thought of the…
Post-Gazette.com – Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes – whatever their genres, the great authors were always great storytellers. Victorian novelist Charles Dickens (1812-70) belongs in that elite company, and although he wrote little for theater, he had a very high dramatic sense and there have always been those to adapt his wonderful stories for the stage. ‘Oliver…
Kicking around ideas ranging from an uptick in child kidnappings to a new link between laptops and cancer, senior CNN staffers held their regular daily meeting this morning to decide which topic viewers should panic about for the rest of the day. —The Onion Similar:Rules of Engagement #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 18) Worf…
So it turns out the “YouTube voice” is just a variety of ways of emphasizing words, none of which are actually exclusive to YouTube—people employ these devices in speech all the time. But they generally do it to grab the listener’s attention, and when you’re just talking to a camera without much action, it takes…
When I announced these style changes, another Twitter user wrote, “wait, it’s 2015 and there are still people who write e-mail?” Not everyone is on Twitter, of course. For every online Post reader snickering at mike, there might be a longtime print subscriber baffled by mic. Because it would be impractical to edit each article separately…
The first review I’ve seen. My daughter plays one of the kids in Fagin’s gang. The adaptation trims a few sub-plots and whittles out some characters, honing it to two and half hours that run well. Some of the novel’s best dialogue is kept, including the famous line “the law is a ass.” Good new…
[Artistic Director Alan] Stanford had no worries about casting a production that features a youngster in the lead and title role as well as additional kids to play members of Fagin’s gang of pickpockets. “There are some amazing kids in this town. They work so hard and are so focused,” he says. Will Sendera, a…
If meeting three strange ladies in the swamp Seems ample cause for murthering the king To take his crown, turn to page 86. If this seems kind of sketchy, turn to 12. Shakespeare’s Choose-Your-Own Adventure. Similar:Sherlock Holmes and The Woman (WAOB Live Virtual Performance)I was happy to play Watson. The daughter…BooksOklahoma Was Never Really O.K.…
American kids today would have little idea how Britain’s wartime rationing may have prepared Edmund to sell out for Turkish Delight. Turkish Delight, or lokum, is a popular dessert sweet throughout Europe, especially in Greece, the Balkans, and of course Turkey. But most Americans, if they have any association with the treat at all, know…
Similar:What does a professor do, other than lecture for a few hours a week? Wow, this response! 😮 We really do hav…AcademiaTeaching with iPads: Motivation, Inspiration and Alienation in the AppleverseHere are the slides for the half-day wor…AcademiaThe Distracted Classroom: Transparency, Autonomy, and PedagogyI don’t ban technology in my classroom, …AcademiaIn Defense of DistractionIf…
Similar:Two classes will turn in final revisions at midnight Sunday, and final multimedia project…Still plenty of work to do before I fini…AcademiaEquus. Powerful theatre.PersonalAssembling wall units to bake into a texture atlas. Teacup is a freebie from polyhaven.co… AestheticsToday's 10 sq cm of a #steampunk control panel (background greebles for a personal project…AestheticsCelebration of Writing…
Boosting the signal. This is a real National Geographic cover, but this issue was likely planned and implemented months before Murdoch purchased the franchise. No, National Geographic hasn’t begun covering nonsense since their merger with Fox. Source: Irrational Geographic : snopes.com Similar:Into the depths of code. Algorithmic archaeologies and cave fantasies in video gamesThe full…
There are actually a number of narratives – some of them competing narratives – at play here in the recent push for coding bootcamps, MOOCs, and other ed-tech initiatives: that everyone should go to college; that college is too expensive – “a bubble” in the Silicon Valley lexicon; that alternate forms of credentialing will be…
Many educators worry that students are more positive about teachers who give better marks regardless of what the students learn, and are more negative about teachers who make students work hard in order to learn. If this is true, it means the simplest way for a teacher to get a good evaluation is to make…
Reporters planning to cover the sit-in arrived at the Massachusetts college’s student center on Wednesday only to find that the protesters intended to keep them out. Alyssa Mata-Flores, a Smith senior and a sit-in organizer, elaborated on the decision to The Republican: “We are asking that any journalists or press that cover our story participate and articulate…
“To take a song like Honky Tonk Woman and study it for its literature is fair enough, but if you are going to revere it as literature you are doing a disservice to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards who would like it to be revered as a great rock’n’roll song. “That is what I have…
If you’re actually in a video store, the stakes are different. You’re engaged. You’re on a mission to find a movie — the right movie. You had to get out of bed, get dressed, and go to a store. You had to think about what you want, why this movie looks good and not that…
To us today, the word “black” carries with it a specific cluster of associations informed by history, culture, stereotypes, and literature. Othello may have started in conversation with Shakespeare’s definition of blackness, but today, he speaks with ours. A much more interesting question, really, is: Why is Othello black? Why did Shakespeare write a domestic…