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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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.…
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,…
What’s your comma IQ? Mine just so happens to be awesome. Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Similar:With actor Ken Bolden, who appears in Quantum Theatre's gripping (and hilarious, and shock… Mix the paranoia of 1984, the absurd…CultureEditors and editorial board quit top linguistics journal to protest subscription feesWhen I publish as a scholar, my goal is…
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…
I’m particularly tickled by the MLA reference. 4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence | The Onion Similar:Googling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google.When I ask my students to use the librar…AcademiaBuzzFeed plagiarism, deleted posts: Jonah Peretti explains.In 2012 my former Slate colleague Farhad…BusinessUpdating a handout I…
Wonderful, magical theater story. It was looking awfully bleak for the Saturday evening performance of “My Fair Lady” when Artistic Director Molly Smith walked onstage surrounded by her cast to deliver some grim news. She informed the nearly full house that flu had laid low several cast members, including Manna Nichols, who played the lead…
Really helpful definition from a “Pinkalicous” children’s theater study guide. That’ll clear everything right up for the kiddos, won’t it? Similar:Why Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering FreshmenWisdom from science writer John Horgan.[…AcademiaWhen you hear your daughter the understudy is going on for a sold-out show. Live theater i… CultureWhy Grown-Ups Keep Talking Like Little…
A hype-heavy treatment of a recent study (named vaguely as the “American Freshman Survey,” in the article, but not actually cited or dated… I found a copy of a 2011 report). While students are much more likely to call themselves gifted in writing abilities, objective test scores actually show that their writing abilities are far…
In other words, more than the profound lessons on the corrupting influence of power, more than the stirring battle scenes, more even than beloved characters like Frodo and Sam, readers came to Tolkien’s books for the rich, magical world that they built out of his words. Martin has taken this lesson to heart in his…
My first-year writing students generally know they aren’t supposed to use Wikipedia as a source in a research paper, but many can’t quite articulate why. A willingness to trace a citation to its source and evaluate the source, rather than accept the source uncritically, is crucial to intellectual competence in the Information Age. An article…