The Great Gatsby Character Map

SomethingSoSam. Similar:Eye of Sauron, Hobbit Door, Palantir and One Ring Easter Eggs.AestheticsSo, what do professors do all day, anyway?Some days I am not Dennis. I am Marky Mc…AcademiaReading Game/Text: EverQuest, Alienation, and Digital Communitiesthough Limbaugh is wrong to decide that …CybercultureLocal News in a Digital AgeLocal TV news is the “most visible prese…AestheticsMechanical #greebles (more…

Crabby 10yo Ties Self to Pole to Protest Injustice

My wife confiscated my preteen daughter’s blush. To protest the injustice, my daughter tied herself to a pole and wrote this protest note. Similar:Quantum's King Lear at Carrie Blast FurnaceThe girl and I were thrilled to catch Qu…CultureA Liberal-Arts Education for Business MajorsThe world needs well-rounded leaders. A …AcademiaGirlhood 2014They don’t even seem to want…

The Apollo 11 Journey in Photographs

July 20, 1969: astronauts from Apollo 11 visited  the lunar surface. The Atlantic. Similar:FULL BLOOM at Latrobe’s Olde Main, Aug 30-Sep 2.Culture20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don't GetI expect my English majors not to balk w…AcademiaAfter a successful piano recital.CultureCinderella Deadlines: Reconsidering Timelines for Student WorkI have been experimenting with midnight …AcademiaHiggs and Englert Are Awarded Nobel…

The Trouble With Online Education

I’ve taught an online “Video Game Culture and Theory” course about four times now. This fall I’m getting ready to teach my first online section of an American literature survey that I’ve taught multiple times before. Because Seton Hill is a very high-tech school, I have few technical worries, but it will be different teaching…

The Lure of the Fairy Tale

There are two varieties of fairy tales. One is the literary fairy tale, the kind written, most famously, by Charles Perrault, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Hans Christian Andersen. Such tales, which came into being at the end of the seventeenth century, are original literary works—short stories, really—except that they have fanciful subject matter: unhappy…

Pulitzer Alert: Local TV Reporter Throws Cookies to Dramatize Destructive Walmart Flash Robbery

The serious-faced TV anchor introduces a live crime report about a destructive Walmart flashmob: “Channel Four’s Emily Turner spoke with our crime analyst about how dangerous these situations can really be.” Emily Turner, looking equally serious, while standing in front of a completely featureless background that doesn’t even have the Walmart logo in frame, says…

Media Helping Media’s Free Training Resources

Some useful-looking journalism resources. These training modules have been put together to offer ongoing help to journalists in transition states, post-conflict countries, and areas where the media is still developing. The only condition for using these modules is that you let us know if you spot any typos. Many have been written on planes, in departure lounges and in…

45 Epic Blender Tutorials

We’ve scoured the web in search of the best Blender tutorials out there and compiled a list of 45 of the most epic we could find. This collection includes a variety of tutorials covering everything from modeling and animation, to rigging and VFX. So grab a coffee and savor the Blender goodness! —45 Epic Blender…

n+1: The Stupidity of Computers

Computers are pretty dumb, but they’re dumb fast. Computers are near-omnipotent cauldrons of processing power, but they’re also stupid. They are the undisputed chess champions of the world, but they can’t understand a simple English conversation. […] [On SHRDLU:] Every human sentence had to be transformed into a logical syntax that represented its meaning. The…