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From Orwell’s 1984, which I’m teaching today in my History and Future of the Book class. This is an excerpt from the book-within-the-book, purportedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein. By comparison with an existing today, all the tyrannies of the past or halfhearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal…
I love the retrofuture. The year I was born, 1968, Mechanix Illustrated offered this prediction of life in the year 2008. I’m still waiting for my flying car, but some of the other predictions were remarkably accurate. The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal…
Play This Thing offers this review of “Photopia” (a text game by Adam Cadre). Photopia is very, very linear. It has very simple puzzles. It’s barely interactive at all. And yet it works. Photopia could be a short story, but it would lose most of its impact. It’s difficult to explain why that is without…
The Times Online has a story about children’s non-profits that are seeking to ban potential employers from checking social profile websites as part of the job application process. I would agree that what a child posts at age 14 is probably not relevant to a job he or she might want to get at age…
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Mike Edwards describes his first time teaching Bartleby the Scrivener: I stole the idea for my lesson plan from a colleague, who’d used it to great success. Minor modifications on my part, but it went like this: for homework, I’d asked them to read the story in its entirety, and told them to be prepared to lead…
For my “History and Future of the Book” course, I’ve been using a Kindle that my university library purchased on my request. Gizmodo has a good article on the digital rights associated with Kindle e-books. In the fine print that you “agree” to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books–you’re…
The Australian publishes an interesting detail about coverage of climate change: Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?” She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not whethat you’d…
Carolyn, my five-year-old, wept in the middle of “Owly 2: Just a Little Blue.” The Owly books use no words, just icons and facial expressions to tell some very complex stories. Carolyn likes stories about adventure and friendship, and she’s a visual learner. Once I helped her interpret the first few speech bubble icons, she…
Language Log offers a great post about the comics convention of using typographical symbols to represent swear words. In any case, ! — * @ # $ % & seem to be the characters most commonly used in the U.S. (I suppose £ and € get some play outside the U.S.) At the moment I…
This article from Politico poses some interesting questions. The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe. The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics. Journalists, for instance, have become partners with the Clinton…
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BoingBoing links to an interesting story about time travel and a self-policing community of time-travelers (modeled on a Wiki community). 11/21/2104 At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote: Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler’s admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape…
Sky News: The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books including 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90, according to an aide. Similar:T.S. Eliot: "when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thought…I remember being fascinated with and…
When I was little, I loved a book about a little red lighthouse that was dwarfed by the construction of a new bridge. I was just thinking about that book recently, and made a mental note to ask my mother what the title was so I could get a copy and read it to my…
Scotsman: “I did not see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to tell that it was Saint-Exupéry. In our youth at school we had all read him, we loved his books. I loved his personality. If I had known I wouldn’t have fired. Not at him.” — 88-year-old Luftwaffe…
So I’m sitting at Julie’s place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice: So students who can only remix don’t get practice thinking critically about culture — and…
Wired | AP offers a brief report on the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s new report: Only a few years ago, newspaper Web sites were primarily considered an online morgue for that day’s newspaper, Rosenstield said. “The afternoon newspaper is in a sense being reborn online,” he said. A separate survey found journalists are, to…
Guardian If generations of gloomy boys could pretend they were the next TS Eliot, then there have been plenty of gloomy girls who have their very own role model in Plath. And a very powerful role model: unlike Eliot, she succeeded in killing herself. Cue thousands of lines of self-pitying poetry without the command and…