For me, this was the money quote in this Chronicle article about a study on the college admissions process: I have never wanted anything in my life as badly as I wanted to get into that college. … That is not how it should be.” Similar:In December 2001 I was blogging aboutIn December 2001, I…
The New Atlantis The structure of social networking sites also encourages the bureaucratization of friendship. Each site has its own terminology, but among the words that users employ most often is “managing.” The Pew survey mentioned earlier found that “teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships.” There is something Orwellian about the…
From the AP, via Editor and Publisher: Colorado State University’s student newspaper has lost $30,000 in advertising and had to cut pay and other budgets by 10 percent because of fallout from the use of a four-letter word in an editorial about President Bush, the Coloradoan reported Saturday. In large type, the editorial included the…
Images of Journalists in Popular Culture (PDF) A newsroom is always filled with fast-talking, bright people whose main work is to speak to strangers, investigate a situation, get answers, develop a story. Since reporters are always finding out something about someone, they create countless stories with good beginnings, middles, and endings. The newspaper gave the…
I’ve been scanning the online coverage of the MIT student who caused a bomb scare when she walked into an airport wearing a blinking circuit board on her sweatshirt. I’m dismayed by the number of headlines that unquestioningly repeat the authorities’ line that she was wearing a “fake bomb.” Several headlines at least put the…
I’ve been laid up in sick all weekend, mostly drifting in and out of sleep. I started getting chills Friday afternoon at work. I zipped up my jacket and put the heater on in the car to keep the chills under control, went to the couch in the basement (where my wife banished me) and…
aibohphobia The irrational fear of palindromes (words that read the same forwards and backwards). Dude 1: Hey, what’s your name? Dude 2: Bob. Dude 1: AAAAAAAAAAH! *Runs and hides behind sofa* Bob: Wow. Dude 1: AAAAAAAAAAH! *Runs away and falls down stairs* This completely stupid fauxbia made me laugh for some reason. There appears to…
Great Zork map. Similar:Giving Obsolete Books an Afterlife as Theatre PropsOnce, someone really cared about these o…AestheticsIs Babylon 5 secretly the most influential TV show of the past 25 years?When my wife and I were grad students in…CultureCompleted uniforms for the officers and crew from the #neovictorian #steampunk bedtime sto… Right now I can move…
The Walls are Closing In  It’s all my fault that now I hear their death – their screams of pain within their final breath. No, we are alive. And thanks to you, we’ll get out. A whole song about such a literal event? Songs in musicals, even if they are showpiece numbers attached closely…
Language Log offers a thorough discussion of the real story of the emoticon. Before seeing the Google Books page image, I had thought that Bierce’s suggested punctuation looked like this: \___/. That’s how it appears in a footnote to Andrew Graham’s online essay, “Forked Tongue: The Language of Serpent in the Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary of…
The LA Times pulls no punches in this column on the aftermath of Dan Rather’s pathetic defense of a slipshod story alleging Bush weaseled his way out of his military duties. Now, if you once had thought of yourself as situated at the heart of the journalistic universe for nearly half a century, and suddenly…
Emily Short reviews a game that tries to make a point: While I sympathize with the message of the game, it didn’t really work for me, for two reasons. First, the game is irritating to play. It’s impossible to undo mistakes (if you accidentally confiscate someone’s pants instead of his shoes, for instance, as I…
Wired’s Threat Level: Just two days after it was yelled out in a University of Florida lecture hall, “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!” has become the newest cultural touchstone of our pop-cultural lexicon. Similar:NASA prepares a Mercury probe for orbitNASA’s Messenger probe is about 10 days …Current_EventsIs Superman the next Drudge? Clark Kent quits newspapers in…
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Miki Louch. When he was a boy, Dr. Pausch said, he had a concrete set of dreams: He wanted to experience the weightlessness of zero gravity; he wanted to play football in the NFL; he wanted to write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia (“You can tell the nerds early…
Words fail me. The LA Times is among many sources reporting that… Longtime CBS anchor Dan Rather filed a $70-million lawsuit today against his former employer, alleging that executives at the broadcast network broke the terms of his contract by marginalizing him in his final days at CBS News and forcing him to retire early.…
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” wrote Fahlman. “Read it…
The New York Musical Theater Festival has some tidbits about an upcoming showing of a musical based on The Last Starfighter. Too bad I’m not really within day-trip distance of New York… this one would tempt me. My nine-year-old son would probably enjoy it, but the trip would be hard on my five-year-old daughter. Oh…
David Cornelson, interviewed in Gamasutra about his plans for marketing text-adventure games to young readers: One of the reasons IF is so fascinating is that you have this junction of programming, game design, and writing. It’s great to toy around with all three of those aspects and try to merge them into something beautiful. The…
Andy Guess (Inside Higher Ed): So technology’s utility in the classroom comes down to how it is used. The question, then, is: How can educators adapt their teaching methods to emerging technologies? And should they? Skeptics might point out that even students themselves are ambivalent when it comes to using the Internet and other digital…
New York Times: In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986,…