Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax

Great example of investigative journalism, piecing together a coherent narrative from conflicting bits and pieces culled from various sources. A reminder that journalists — even when they are fighting deadlines, and even when they are writing more-fluffy-than-the-crime-beat pieces — must verify claims before going public. Too many sports journalists reported unconfirmed bits and pieces of…

President JoAnne Boyle Announces Plans to Retire from Seton Hill University in June 2013

An amazing, inspiring set of accomplishments. This is the 25th year of her presidency. “President Boyle has prepared us well for this moment in our history. During the last decade, the University raised over $105 million in gifts and pledges for the renovation and construction of facilities, the expansion of academic programs and the Seton…

Smartphones, Silly Users

Frequent smartphone use imposes significant psychological costs on the user, and negatively impacts our personal and professional lives. —Daniel Gulati – Harvard Business Review. Similar:Should you trust media bias charts? – PoynterTraditional journalism values a focus on…CultureThe Cover Letter That Led to Awesome InterviewsWhen I do a career planning unit, I am o…BusinessCoding Bootcamps and…

Next Role for My 10yo: Peter Pan

She’ll perform next week as the bumblebee “Hi… are you a flower?” in Pinkalicious (sharing the role with two of her fellow Annies) but today Stage Right posted the cast list for the homeschool preteen production of Peter Pan. She’s a natural for the part. The cast list for the teen “Wizard of Oz” should…

The No-Nonsense, Non-Alarmist, Essential Guide to the Flu – Kicker

Let’s get this straight first… Flu is the respiratory sickness caused by the influenza virus that threatens the functions of your nose, throat and lungs. Flu is a virus that spreads by injecting its genetic information into the nuclei of your cells. In other words, it hijacks the good cells and controls their function to…

Journalist math fail: “New pay-per-mile scheme would boost taxes 250 percent”

Hold on… An on-again, off-again move by the Obama administration to scrap the federal gas tax in favor of a pay-per-mile fee would boost the tab to Americans as high as 250 percent, raising their current tax of 18.4 cents a gallon to as high as 46 cents, according to a new government study. —New…

My View: What will you do with an English degree? Plenty

I just found my first reading assignment for the “Intro to Literary Study” class I’ll be teaching in a week. Almost every college student who considers majoring in English – or French, or philosophy, or art history – inevitably hears the question: “What in the world are you going to do with that?” The question…

Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?

The Twitter version: There’s a slight decrease in violent crime when violent movies are playing. People who like violence tend to go watch the movie instead of going out and doing violent things. Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in…

Xark!: Why I shut down comments

While blogs still exist as convenient ways for authors to compile and archive their writing over time, commenting has long been driven (by spammers) into other social media, like Twitter and Facebook. What follows is an interesting snapshot of the Cyberculture change, as it was happening. What really changed between 2005 and 2009 was that…

A 27-Story Vertical Forest Grows in Milan

Bosco Verticale was conceived in response to the alarming levels of air pollution in Milan. The structure itself is no more radical than your average high-rise tower block, but when fortified with over 700 balcony-perched trees, not only will the buildings look like two enormous topiaries in the middle of the city, but they will…

On Stephen Hawking, Vader and Being More Machine Than Human

In one version of Hawking’s eulogistic story, we praise the smartest person in the world, the brilliant physicist, one of the greatest cosmologists of our time. He fits perfectly well with our conception of how science and its heroes work: To be a genius all one needs is a powerful – a “beautiful” – mind.…

Mother 3: My Mom, and Me

Thoughtful, powerful, personal analysis of a computer game. Blogging this as an example of “new games journalism,” so I can have it handy the next time I teach Video Game Culture and Theory. When someone you love dies, your view of the world takes on an air of mysticism. You find meaning in places you…

Worried about the future of books? Here’s what you can do.

It’s a lot easier to be selfish, to be an artistic libertarian who decides “I will just concern myself with making my work and I’ll just hope and pray there’s still some kind of an apparatus in place to edit, design, produce, market, distribute and sell it when it’s done, or else imagine that I’ll…

11 Tips H.P. Lovecraft Had for Novice Writers

“Avoid reading so as not to taint your creative brilliance; ignore any rules of grammar and syntax that are too complex and boring; and never, ever revise.” — writing tips never given by successful authors Lovecraft is not my favorite author — in part because the horror conventions he experimented with are now so common…

Vote for your favorite Monopoly token — or else!

One of the six current game pieces will be voted out, to make room for one of these new ones. I’m partial to the captain’s chair in Star Trek Monopoly. What do you think about these options? Hasbro, maker of the board game available in 111 countries and 43 languages, is replacing one of the…

Towards a canon of “hypertext literature / interactive fiction / digital narrative”

Kim asked on Twitter: “Is there a canon for digital narratives / interactive stories / hypertext literature yet? A list of accepted classics and forms?” What followed was a lot of us going “we don’t know”. And I wasn’t exactly helpful, by pointing out that those three things are (in some ways) completely different. But.…

Well-chosen words

Why is English spelling such a tangle? It all started when Latin-speaking missionaries arrived in Britain in the 6th century without enough letters in their alphabet. They had 23. (They didn’t have “j”, “u” or “w”.) Yet the Germanic Anglo-Saxon languages had at least 37 phonemes, or distinctive sounds. The Romans didn’t have a letter,…

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

What’s your comma IQ? Mine just so happens to be awesome. Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Similar:TSA Agent ConfessionIt was May 2007. I was living with a boh…CultureThe 22 rules of storytelling, according to PixarMy favorite: “Once upon a time there was…ArtThe Importance of Writing Skills in Tech-Related FieldsGood writing skills are valuable, even i…AcademiaHow newsroom…

Stephen Coles’ The Anatomy of Type, reviewed.

Talk nerdy to me. You’re my type. What about old friend Helvetica, Miss Typography of 1957 (and pretty much every year after)? Coles theorizes that its universality stems from the fact that its “shapes and widths are unusually uniform.” This homogeneity makes it perfect for big display logos but “not as effective for long passages…

4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence

I’m particularly tickled by the MLA reference. 4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence | The Onion Similar:When F. Scott Fitzgerald Judged Gatsby By Its Cover With a big Hollywood movie now in th…AestheticsThe Surprisingly Savvy Weird Al Internet Machine When he talks about his business being…AestheticsToilet paper isn't selling…