For a long time, I’ve thought about creating a game to teach the fundamentals of journalism. Last weekend during my son’s chess tournament I started roughing out the plot, and today I started using Twine to implement it. Since I already had the plot broken up into text chunks, I got a whole lot done…
PITTSBURGH—Audience members at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts are reporting that, oh God, no, approximately 20 extremely enthusiastic actors are approaching the edge of the stage and appear determined to continue their current musical number in the main seating area. — The Onion Similar:WAOB MisSpelled (final episode airs)The final episode of the fantasy/comedy …AmusingThe…
Before Watchman was published, I was skeptical and unhappy — all the publicity made it sound like nothing but a clever lawyer and a greedy publisher in cahoots to exploit an old woman. Now, having read the book, I glimpse a different tragedy. Lee was a young writer on a roll, with several novels…
By the 1950s, as air conditioners became common in the home, family life in the summer moved back inside, and increasingly centered on a new consumer technology called the television. Amusement parks and playgrounds emptied out, and people retreated from their stoops and the streets to their living rooms. Even attendance at baseball games dropped in the 1960s. —The Washington…
My geekling daughter, who in Willy Wonka flashed Mr. Spock’s Vulcan greeting during Veruca Salt’s contract-signing scene, also worked a Star Trek reference into Godspell. Here as she says goodbye to Jesus, she is doing the Vulcan gesture in a tribute to Spock’s death (in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). The needs of the many outweigh the needs of…
What kind of boss hires a thwarted actress for a business-to-business software startup? Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s 42-year-old cofounder and CEO, whose estimated double-digit stake in the company could be worth $300 million or more. He’s the proud holder of an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Canada’s University of Victoria and a master’s degree from Cambridge…
As a kid, I remember liking the famous “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial. As a teenager, I remember seeing a series of Coke ads in the summer, with the theme of “It’s too hot, look at these pictures of happy people in the snow, buy a Coke,” and then 6 months…
Oh, how I wish we lived in a world where this was NOT a spoof. A spot-on parody of SportsCenter’s hyperbole-laden talking heads, busy CGI ticker screens, and obsessive play-by-plays, the clip cleverly reimagines athletes as the educators we entrust our children to every day.Unsurprisingly, it’s a biting critique that says a lot about the…
Who owns the copyright to the “Happy Birthday” song? According to Snopes: Summy-Birchard, a subsidiary of Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., the publishing arm of Warner Music Group, now claims to be the sole owner of copyright to the song “Happy Birthday to You” and collects an estimated $2 million per year in licensing fees (a portion…
Good writing skills are valuable, even in the world of STEM. How is it that students interested in careers in technology don’t understand that writing skills are a crucial part of their future success? What’s more, in my life as a writing coach, I’ve noticed that this aversion sometimes extends well past the undergraduate years…
Incredibly detailed close reading of the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I stopped reading it halfway through because I want to watch the movie again (haven’t seen it in years) so that I can really appreciate what this author is doing. I’m looking forward to coming back to this one! Yet the audience believes…
Copy editors are to the world of publishing what the stage manager is to the world of theater. I love copy editors and I love stage managers. When the copy editor for my latest book placed a little check mark over the name of a computer game, Snood, and then wrote in the margin (“snood.en.softonic.com”),…
I’m preparing to teach Shakespeare again this fall. Seton Hill offers the course every other year, so each time it comes around, it feels new. The course will focus on plays, but I do like starting out with a brief unit on the sonnet in order to help my students get accustomed to the language. It occurred…
An excerpt from a poem that explores humanity’s relationship with machinery in this post-industrial age. Tell the machines we honor their dead, distant cousins. Tell them we tendered those cities to repose out of respect for welded steel’s bygone era. —The Poetry Foundation Similar:Why I Took My Kids’ Toys AwayMy wife is something of a…
An email from a reputable higher education publisher just landed in my inbox. “Paid Invitation to Review Digital, Print Products.” But the actually messages says “If you complete the survey by July 21st, 2015, your name will be entered into a drawing to receive one of three $50 Visa Gift Cards.” Hm… how would Reputable…
The image (by Magee and Griffin) is an excerpt from a rough draft; a slightly different version is available as a poster, on mugs and totebags etc., from the National Theatre Shop. Similar:Blood Oath (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 19) Glory to Dax and her three aging… Rewatching ST:DS9 A rowdy Klingon…AmusingIf You Think…
Stage Right Nation goes Into the Woods at Saint Vincent Summer Theater. Great job Renata, Elly, and the whole cast & crew. Similar:Happily masked in center row C. (The daughter is dance captain.)DramaMy contribution to WAOB Audio Theatre’s plan to record all the proverbs.My contribution to WAOB Audio Theatre’s …CultureBook geyser. My latest #Blender3D practice.In…
[T]he traditional consensus is that journalism education should be focused on practical vocational skills including shorthand, news gathering and news writing and yet it is situated within an academic environment, whose core business is research.Although the practitioner academic is fairly common in universities today, due to the huge rise in converted polytechnics teaching vocational…
Pick a play. Click a line. Instantly see articles on JSTOR that reference the line. Understanding Shakespeare is a collaborative project between JSTOR Labs and the Folger Shakespeare Library. It’s a research tool that allows students, educators and scholars to use the text of Shakespeare’s plays to quickly navigate into the scholarship written about them—line…
I am inclined to agree with the “favorite scholarly idea” that is here criticized, if only to offer a counterpoint to the notion that the “I” who speaks in each Shakespeare sonnet is a coherent and consistent stand-in for Shakespeare himself, and that the proper way to understand a poem is to imagine a situation…