In the past few years, I have noticed more students are applying the word “novel” to any text they might be asked to study in class, whether that text is a book-length fictional narrative, a play, a poem, a political manifesto, or a collection of academic essays. I wrote up this lecture to introduce the…
“It’s quite gobsmacking to think that a story could be told for 10,000 years,” Nicholas Reid, a linguist at Australia’s University of New England specializing in Aboriginal Australian languages, said. “It’s almost unimaginable that people would transmit stories about things like islands that are currently underwater accurately across 400 generations.” —Scientific American.
[Jobs] was right to leave out the productivity features and go big on the simple tactile pleasure of holding the Internet in your hands. But for all its popularity and appeal, the iPad never has quite cleared the bar he set for it, which was to be “far better” at some key tasks than a…
In the last chaotic days of Nazi Germany, in a train transferring concentration camp prisoners to Dachau, a teenager hears the cries of babies. At 14, William Glied has already lost his family.
I know next to nothing about archery. According to this video, even the little I thought I knew was completely wrong. An archers with a quiver on his back is a movie icon which is widespread throughout the world. But putting arrows in a quiver on your back is not a good solution. It is…
Okay, I confess, I was once in the audience at an MLA session about medieval drama, when someone brought up a relevant computer simulation, and there was a disagreement over how to interpret the results. I raised my hand and said, “I created that simulation,” and weighed in on one side of the debate. It all…
I’m sure there are hipsters, even now, lamenting “I just think without the organic feel of the human arm, the selfie really loses something,” but we have not listened to them before, and we need not heed them now. —The Washington Post.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. The original, “’Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle,’ was the tender Christmas message sent by Ian Maclaren to the readers of The British Weekly” (1898) uses an unfamiliar definition of “pitiful” and uses the gender-specific “man,” so the modernized version is understandably more popular.
“We hope these helpful new alerts will improve our users’ experience by prompting them to revisit the site in the event they momentarily turn their focus elsewhere,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Sure, Saturn’s rings are cool, but the Earth is pretty awesome too, what with the water, the oxygen, the life, the chocolate. So let’s imagine just how awesome Earth would be if it also had rings. Ron Miller’s illustrations show various views of the earth with what that lucky planet Saturn has. —Ron Miller/Black Cat…
Back in 2009, the story of Alice and Kev, a blog about two homeless Sims characters, drew a lot of attention. (At the end of the story, the blogger asked for readers to help fight homelessness in the real world.) Here’s another interesting collision of the world of games and the world of social action.
I remember wanting to like Voyager a lot more than I did. The first episode showed some promise, but I remember being disappointed with the first season. Looking back, I can see I was equally disappointed by the first Star Trek movie and the first few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Some moments from the show…
My colleague Mike Arnzen talked about the writing process with the Voice of America. Michael Arnzen teaches English and heads humanities studies at Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania. Mr. Arnzen is also an award-winning author. He says he understands the desire to write something and be done with it. “We’ve all been there. We feel…
Twine games look and feel profoundly different from other games, not just because they’re made with different tools but also because they’re made by different people – including people who don’t have any calcified notions about what video games are supposed to be or how they’re supposed to work. While roughly 75% of developers at…
I’m introducing text adventure games to the students in my online “Video Game Culture and Theory” course. A few years ago, when my son was 11, I made a screencast of him encountering a text adventure game for the first time. My students generally like watching this video, since it gives them an idea of…
Let’s hope many, many more journalism stories end as happily as the Kirby Delauter saga. Local official Kirby Delauter posts Facebook rant, threatening legal action against a reporter for “unauthorized” use of his name. Newspaper editorial mocks the threats, in an editorial titled “Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter.” The internet loves the story. Kirby Delauter issues…
This breaking news story confuses “honing” and “homing.” I make mistakes too, and would certainly make even more if I were writing up breaking news on a story that is deeply personal to everyone in the world who values the freedom of speech. The manhunt for two men suspected in the massacre at a satirical newspaper’s…
The Battle of New Orleans was a series of engagements fought between December 23, 1814 through January 8, 1815 and was the final major battle of the War of 1812.[5][6] American combatants,[7] commanded by Major General Andrew Jackson, prevented an invading British Army, commanded by General Edward Pakenham, and Royal Navy, commanded by Admiral Alexander Cochrane, from seizing New Orleans as a strategic tool to end the war.[8][9][10][11] The Treaty of Ghent was…
What Happens When Clickbait Headlines Avoid Mentioning the Young Boys Wouldn’t Slap the Girl? Headlines like these are all over social media right now. Young boys asked to slap girl in social experiment What happens when you ask an Italian boy to slap a girl? You might be surprised. What happens when you put a…
I think it’s a mistake to think of Homer as a person. Homer is an “it.” A tradition. An entire culture coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of telling stories that are important to it. Homer is essentially shared. Today we have an author obsession—we want to know biography all…