As much as I love escapist science fiction, the way to get to the future for real is to avoid killing each other and ourselves in the present. We can’t count on capitalist techbros selling joyrides to billionaire tourists. People tend to liken space exploration to expansion on Earth—pushing the frontier. But on the edge…
After starting my 200-level “Shakespeare in Context” students on a few sonnets, I assigned Twelfth Night (most had never read a Shakespeare comedy before) and Othello (they loved Iago), and then asked them to sample four different plays — The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Jonson’s…
If you are writing an academic paper that quotes from an author that uses the ellipsis in a way that differs from MLA style (such as the script of a modern play that uses “…” to indicate when a speaker is interrupted, or a graphic novel that might use “…” to indicate a meaningful silence…
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Rewatching ST:DS9 A haggard O’Brien, with a scraggly beard, is released from an alien prison. He seems disoriented… “I can’t leave. Where would I go to?” A concerned Kira watches as smug aliens infodump that they punish offenders by inserting extended memories of incarceration — twenty years, in O’Brien’s case. Sisko explains to Keiko that…
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Rewatching ST:DS9 After a nightmare featuring dead Klingon children, Worf wakes up in Odo’s security cell. He’s clearly in trouble. A Vulcan admiral convenes a Federation hearing called to explore allegations that, while commanding The Defiant, Worf destroyed a Klingon civilian transport. A Klingon prosecutor, Ch’pok, intends to prove Worf’s negligence, thereby stoking sympathy for…
In September, 2003, I was blogging about What the NY Times called the “campus fad” of Internet plagiarism. “What Does a Professor Do All Day?” (Clearly we are wasting our time whenever we are not standing in front of a classroom.) “Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables“ Leni Riefenstahl Dies (although she distanced…
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For the past 2 weeks I have slept a lot, coughed a lot, and one of my four classes is a week behind where I had hoped to be, but I guess I’ll be okay. Still dealing with some heavy eldercare and other issues that I just don’t have the energy to write about here,…
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I’ve enjoyed human-written A/V Club articles in the past. I see no reason to seek out articles written by bots that copy existing material word-for-word and add no value. The company G/O, mentioned in the clip below, owns the A.V. Club and is behind the shift to bot-authored articles: “A/V Club [sic] licenses content from…
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Rewatching ST:DS9 Worf wins a furious sparring match with Dax, but she discombobulates his composure, first by accusing him of trying to flirt with her, and then by actually flirting with him. A drunken Klingon arrives on the station, calling for Worf. It’s his brother Kurn, come to ask for a ritual death due to…