In February two students complained about an Allen Ginsberg poem that, at the request of a fellow student, was shared in Olio’s AP English class at South Windsor High School in Connecticut. A media uproar followed, and Olio was essentially forced to resign. Most of the facts do not appear to be in dispute – and are more…
Relaxing in bed on the first Sunday morning of my summer break, I web-surfed across the name of something I was interested in, on a “Top 5” list. I host some “Top #X Whatevers” pages on my website, but I put all the items (writing tips of some sort) on one page, and include a…
[N]o matter how good the design, and despite rigorous tests of impact, I have never seen technology systematically overcome the socio-economic divides that exist in education. Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else. Many people believe that technology “levels the playing field” of learning, but what I’ve discovered is that…
This Time magazine article is a good one, but that “what you think you know is wrong” headline is more of the same obnoxious clickbait that the article itself critiques, so here’s a bit of what I found useful. Scrolling is more acceptable behavior than it used to be. We’re all much more used to…
“If you want to know how the game was played in 2014, you will need documentation about how the game was played in 2014,” Lowood said. “Having the game available to you in 2064 so that you can play it yourself won’t tell you anything about that. It just tells you how you, 50 years…
* The best stories are the ones you find, not the ones assigned to you. If you can keep yourself busy doing your own story ideas, editors won’t have to assign you stories. … * … and if you get assigned a story, don’t leave the editor’s desk until you know exactly what she wants.…
After reading a clickbaity Bloomberg article that made a big deal about how ending emails with “Best” is supposedly wrong, I updated part of my “Email Tips” handout. I don’t think it matters whether you close your email with “Best” or “Thanks” or nothing at all, as long as you aren’t obsequious and wasteful on…
I have no particular opinion about how to close an email. I just checked my “outbox” and I see that I haven’t closed any of my recent messages. Several were responses to requests from other people, so “Thank you” would be out of place, and even “Here you go” would be so unnecessary it would…
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The legendary Bob Schieffer is calling it a career Sunday as he hosts his last “Face the Nation.” “We now don’t know where people get their news, but what we do know is they’re bombarded with information 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Most of the information is wrong and some of it…
When your mind wanders, its like P. T. Barnum putting on a sideshow while the stage is being rebuilt….[P]articipants who did more mind wandering got more creative on the repeated unusual uses tasks; they came up with more creative solutions to the problems presented to them after they had some time to let their brains…
“Hi. I’m Jason Scott, and I am trying to collect every AOL CD variation ever made.” Scott works for the Internet Archive, which is kind of like a museum for the Internet. And to him, these CDs are precious artifacts. “They are, in some ways, little time capsules about what online life was and why we wanted…
Anyone with an English degree will tell you that picking this major can lead to a lot skeptical questions: “What are you going to do after school?” or “What kind of a job can you really get with an English degree?” But the awesome part about this major is its flexibility—you’re not confined to a…
Committed to the eradication of illiteracy “by any means necessary,” RIF was formed in 1973 by a coalition of dissident librarians censured by the government for their extremist views. Some 500 deaths have been linked to the group in the past 24 years, including a 1991 incident in which an armored bookmobile exploded at a…
A Mark Twain short story, written in 1898, and set a few years into the future, posits the global ubiquity of a new device called the “telelectroscope,” which lets people around the world see and hear each other. The author, a journalist and a social reformer, explored how an innocent man might save himself from a…
Clever little Easter eggs in this article about the history of My Fair Lady refer to lyrics from the show. I played Col. Pickering in high school 30 years ago. One night during “The Rain in Spain,” when Higgins threw the xylophone mallet in the air, it got stuck in the drapes above the stage.…
At GDC 2015, noted interactive fiction game designer Emily Short (Galatea, Counterfeit Monkey) gave a microtalk on how to create a protagonist that is interesting, engaging and will stimulate your players. —Gamasutra Similar:The Language of Gender ViolenceOppressors deny their own agency and deh…Culture19 Book Cover ClichésThis one is #3, “Man Lurking by Fence.” …AestheticsPut up the…
When I teach creative writing, I notice that novices frequently write as if describing a what a TV screen would show if a camera had zoomed in for a close-up of their narrator’s face. By contrast, an experienced writer would rely on a much wider range of storytelling techniqes, including dialogue and interior thoughts. “What do…
Two people who saw a police encounter on Wednesday reported different details; surveillance videotape showed that both of them were wrong. —NYT Similar:Tales from the Antiquities Theft Task ForceA shot of Kim Kardashian leaning ag…AestheticsThe Neutral Zone (ST:TNG Rewatch: Season 1, Episode 25)Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…CultureMy tween found this creative use for an extra…
Verizon has experimented with journalism before, briefly running Sugarstring — where reporters were banned from covering issues like government surveilance and net neutrality (topics in which Verizon is a newsmaker). Verizon buying AOL gives the biggest US wireless carrier access to AOL’s successful digital advertising service and content including the Huffington Post news website. —CS…