August Wilson, 60, one of America’s greatest playwrights, has told the Post-Gazette he is dying of liver cancer. “It’s not like poker, you can’t throw your hand in,” he said by phone from Seattle. “I’ve lived a blessed life. I’m ready.” —Christopher Rawson —Playwright Wilson says he’s dying (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) I’ll be teaching Wilson’s Fences in…
Word that Sgt. Dan Kennings had been killed in Iraq crushed spirits in the Daily Egyptian newsroom. The stocky, buzz-cut soldier befriended by students at the university newspaper was dead, and the sergeant’s little girl–a precocious, blond-haired child they’d grown to love–was now an orphan. They all knew that Kodee Kennings’ mother had died when…
Michael Gee, ex-Boston Herald sports writer, posted his ill-advised commentary on the ?incredibly hot? student with the ?bitchin? bod? on a message board. Check out the WaPo article, and click on the link to the ?blog? Robert MacMillan cites: SportsJournalists.com. There is no blog present. What you see is called a message board, or a…
Cuneiform, the world’s first script, was born in southern Iraq, and carbon dating indicates it originated between 3400 and 3300 B.C., writes Robert Biggs in one of the book’s finest essays. There must have been quite a burst of innovation, because within a century or two the wheel appeared as well. It was quickly put…
At the height of the conflict, Britain guaranteed freedom to any slave who fought for the king against George Washington’s slave-owning rebels. And in 1772, in London, Lord Mansfield, nudged by the advocacy of Granville Sharp, an abolitionist, judged that Africans could not be transported against their will. It sounded good. Thousands of slaves, lacking…
Podcasts get their name from combining iPods with radio broadcasting. It all started when a few folks started recording indie talk radio programs and releasing them online, intending them to be uploaded to iPods and listened to on the road. Of course, Apple, knowing what was happening, decided to push the technology into the mainstream…
The fact is, there will be no more books to restock. The UT library is undergoing a radical change, becoming more of a social gathering place more akin to a coffeehouse than a dusty, whisper-filled hall of records. And to make that happen, the undergraduate collection of books had to go. This summer, 90,000 volumes…
While the news lead told the five Ws and the H, the lead of a sports story (though not limited to one paragraph) must contain certain elements. When editing sports, check the lead for: 1. Who was involved 2. What happened 3. When 4. Where 5. Name of the sport 6. Score 7. How won…
User interface agents are increasingly used in software products; perhaps the best-known user interface agent is the Microsoft Office Assistant (“Clippy the Paperclip”). This thesis explores why many people have a negative response to the Office Assistant, using a combination of theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative studies. Among the findings were that labels–whether internal cognitive labels…
A Microsoft Corp. product is headed to the big screen for the first time — but don’t worry, moviegoers won’t be asked to suffer through two hours of Clippy. The company’s “Halo” video-game franchise and its hero, Master Chief, will provide the basis for a major movie under a deal between Microsoft and movie studios…
“I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” Henderson affirms. “It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence,…
If you’re older than about 38, words and phrases like “frotz,” “xyzzy,” “maze of twisty passages all alike,” and “eaten by a grue” trigger sharp remembrance, like Marcel Proust eating a madeleine. You’ll instantly reminisce about text games like Infocom’s Deadline, Suspended, Infidel, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and a zillion Scott Adams titles from Adventure…
Text games circa 2005, however, are called interactive fiction or interactive storytelling. Some are book-length, requiring 20 to 30 hours to play and read. Others are more akin to short stories and can be completed in a half hour. “The goal is to make you forget you’re sitting at a computer and to make you…
2. Desi Arnaz, Orson Welles, Roy Orbison, Ted Bundy, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Cary Grant have always been dead. 3. “Heeeere’s Johnny!” is a scary greeting from Jack Nicholson, not a warm welcome from Ed McMahon. 4. The Energizer bunny has always been going, and going, and going. 5. Large fine-print ads for prescription drugs have…
The world’s grown too complex for journalists to cover using only literary skills. A generation ago, forward-thinking journalists developed computer-assisted reporting techniques, uncovering stories from public databases, including crime reports, school test scores and census data. Unfortunately, CARR has remained a specialty within journalism, rather than a core skill. Part of this can be attributed…
Like a zombie from a George Romero flick, the PointCast model refuses to die. The latest incarnation? Google Sidebar aggregrates news headlines, plus custom local weather reports and stock quotes in a desktop application window. Sidebar also adds new features, including the ability to read messages sent to a Gmail account and reader-selected RSS feeds…
I know I should worry. I am a historian, after all, and if people will not read fiction, surely they will read less history. And I’m a teacher, and like everyone else in the humanities, I know students just do not read like they used to do. The trouble is, I am not sure the…
What happens when the title of a hit movie doesn’t conform to AP style? That question was answered in recent days when newspapers started reviewing and writing about the new box office hit whose official name is “The 40 Year-Old Virgin.” Of course, as any reporter or editor worth his or her salt knows, there…
Despite “the rhetoric of student culture,” she writes, students are not only studying less, they are also spending less time socializing than students a generation ago. The reason why, she offers, is that they’re too busy holding wage-paying jobs. In addition, efforts to create a more cohesive college community are stymied because the “sheer number…
A childhood interest in the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments, would lead Moog to a create a career and business that tied the name Moog as tightly to synthesizers as the name Les Paul is to electric guitars. Despite traveling in circles that included jet-setting rockers, he always considered himself a technician.…