TSA Agent Confession

It was May 2007. I was living with a bohemian set on Chicago’s north side, a crowd ranging from Foucault-fixated college kids to middle-aged Bukowski-bred alcoholics. We drank and talked politics on the balcony in the evenings, pausing only to sneer at hipsters strumming back-porch Beatles sing-a-longs. By night, I took part in barbed criticism…

Alice in Quantumland: A Charming Illustrated Allegory of Quantum Mechanics by a CERN Physicist

Alice in Quantumland: An Allegory of Quantum Physics is absolutely fantastic in its entirety, certain to engage the simultaneous states of entertainment and education with unequaled grace. Complement it with scientists’ answers to little kids’ questions about how the world works, then bend your mind by considering what it’s like to live in a universe…

International Studies Association proposes to bar editors from blogging

“I think it’s a really strange proposal in 2014,” said Stephen M. Saideman, a professor at Carleton University in Canada and one of many political science scholars who assailed the policy on social media. “I would have expected it in 2006.” Faculty members, several outside the field of international studies, said the proposal is simultaneously…

Facebook, really? More people liked the picture in my post than saw the post that includes the picture?

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I sometimes snark at the @Turnitin interface, but…

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Should the AP Really Have Fired This Pulitzer-Prize War Photographer?

The original shot caught a Syrian rebel fighter moving from his position, his AK-47 in hand. It also showed something else: “a colleague’s video camera” in “the lower left corner of the frame,” according to the AP’s investigation. Before filing the image to his editors, Contreras used digital software to take the camera out of…

RT @PhilKomarny: A floppy disc… In #context htt…

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@MichaelSimsBook @mkonnikova “When a blogger uses…

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The Six Things That Make Stories Go Viral Will Amaze, and Maybe Infuriate, You

Overblown Headline of New Yorker Article on Memes Will Amaze, and Maybe Infuriate, You In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content—in his case, a speech—persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos. Content should have…

Not Bad for an English Major

I didn’t have much choice when it came to picking a background for some publicity shots for Stage Right’s production of a new musical, “Little Red.” At the time, this background seemed better than all the alternatives, but when it came time to design a Facebook ad, I ended up very unsatisfied. Fortunately, I have…

Where Professors Send Their Children to College

To understand this story, you have to keep in mind the distinction between a large research–oriented university (where professors teach about 2 courses a semester and spend a lot of their time conducting their own research and supervising graduate students) and a small liberal arts college (where professors teach about 4 courses per semester, spend…

When a Blogger Shares a Too-good-to-be-true Meme Featuring Hilarious Handwritten Notes from a Passive-Aggressive Attention Whore Who Can’t Deal Maturely with One of Life’s Routine Disappointments and Some Random Person Who Isn’t Benefitting in the Least from all the Attention, You Won’t Believe What Happens Next

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