That day, on the Southampton docks in England, the Torkos family wallowed in disappointment. Anxious to head home to Monessen, Westmoreland County, the Hungarian family had been banned from boarding the ship because of the cut on 7-year-old Mary’s cheek. Fearing the spread of infection throughout the ship’s steerage, officials banned Mary, and thus the…
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“This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black,” Zimmerman is heard saying in NBC’s edited version. The difference is significant, since activists have been claiming that Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin. Critics have argued that NBC set out to purposely advance that narrative by condensing the 911 tape to make it…
Looks like this blogger presented the chart as an implicit argument about the quality of literature being read today, rather than the quantity. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition…
Christ willingly stretches himself down on the cross. Surprised, one of the soldiers observes: “Behold, himself has laid him down,/and bent his back unto this tree.” From one of the first web pages I created, for an academic article about a computer simulation of the epic medieval Christian pageant the York Corpus Christi Cycle. The…
According to my 9yo daughter, “It’s completely and utterly stupidulous.” Pancho McFarland, an associate professor of sociology at Chicago State, fears the policy could restrict all types of communications by professors, including speaking engagements. “It will put a chilling effect on our ability to speak in a number of venues,” he said. “It is part…
Regular readers will perhaps know that I (and others) have been saying for a while that Mesozoic Earth was not the global hothouse that many have long assumed. There’s evidence for cool continental interiors and poles during parts of the Jurassic and Cretaceous (Barron & Washington 1982, , Sloan & Barron 1990, Sellwood et al.…
“Whether in the lecture hall or in a textbook, anyone is obviously free to teach the subjects biology, economics, or psychology, and can do so using, creating, and refining the pedagogical materials they think best, whether consisting of ‘open source educational content’ or otherwise,” it reads. “But by making unauthorized ‘shadow-versions’ of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works,…
My 9yo was ordered not to leave the kitchen table until her lessons were done, but she wanted to communicate to the world that she was in a bad mood. From where she was sitting, she had access to paper, scissors, and tape, which she used to construct this head-mounted frump-amplicfaction isolation cube. Ironically, it…
In Stallybrass’s mind, students—and in fact, all scholars—need to do less thinking and more working. “When you’re thinking,” Stallybrass writes, “you’re usually staring at a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen, hoping that something will emerge from your head and magically fill that space. Even if something ‘comes to you,’ there’s no reason…
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What follows is an excerpt from NBC Jumps the Shark on George Zimmerman | Mother Jones: According to the Today show, here’s what George Zimmerman said to a 911 dispatcher as he was trailing Trayvon Martin last February: Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black. What a racist! Obviously Zimmerman had a real…
This is both creepily terrifying yet kind of awesome, in a drunk-whisperer, Pied Piper, passive-aggressive arrogantly Gallic yet obviously better than pepper spray and riot gear kind of way. You have encountered a “Pierrot de la Nuit,” or Night Mime. These “nocturnal artistic intervention squads” are officially being launched this weekend in 15 Parisian neighborhoods.…
I’ll be Tweeting my workday, as part of an organized grass-roots response to a recent essay that claimed faculty members outside research institutions earn professional salaries for just 9-15 hours of teaching a week, for just 30 weeks. That essay assumes that 1 hour of prep time is all a prof should need. It takes…
Over the past five years, print-on-demand technology and a growing number of self-publishing companies whose books can be sold online have inspired writers of all ages to bypass the traditional gatekeeping system for determining who could call himself a “published author.” They include hundreds of children and teenagers who are self-publishing books each year —…
I did not include the very best part of the story, which is the very last few lines, but you have to read the whole thing to appreciate the writing. The little boy didn’t want to say goodbye, but his mom told him, “Batman needs to go fight the bad guys.” The little boy cried.…
I often have a gentle chuckle to myself at some of the random combinations that are generated by our bot chums. Vaksman Innes, Hoaglin Little, Marylou Freas – surely the names of previously anonymous guests from one of Jay Gatsby’s parties? Tanisha Hendricks, Lee Buffet, Tish Dreith – straight from a Jilly Cooper novel? Tia…
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A Princeton physics professor tries to get all rational over climate change fears. I am fascinated by the way this plays out in public, among non-scientists trying to make sense of it all. It is easy to be confused about climate, because we are constantly being warned about the horrible things that will happen or…
I’m preparing to teach this foundational work of hypertext theory. On the surface, this short story is a spy thriller, in which a subversive protagonist relies on intellect to match wits with a worthy, authority-wielding foe. Originally published in Spanish in 1941, this story takes the form of a conventional narrative, but its plot features…