Good communication is not necessarily about using an expansive vocabulary. It is about properly using the words and punctuation you already know. —The Commonly Confused Words Test (OK Cupid) It’s a good thing for my sense of professional pride that I scored as an English Genius, though according to the site I got one answer wrong.…
To blend in, I sat at the $10 craps table and started to lose the magazine‘smoney with dispatch. I mean, I had to sit at a table so a Borgata Babe would give me a drink and I could check her out?er, I mean, interview her about the ethical implications of the new weight policy.…
The emergence of cyberbullying has intensified adolescent angst. It allows bullies to unleash put-downs, nasty rumors and humiliating pictures in e-mail and blogs that can strike victims at home and at any time. The damage can be devastating, psychologists say, even as it is not always obvious to parents and teachers. —Jon Swartz —Schoolyard bullies…
Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst at the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said employees often “don’t realize the First Amendment doesn’t protect their job.” The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech. So private employers are free to fire at will in most states, as long as it’s not discriminatory or in retaliation…
Last week‘sblog on the state of videogame writing, and the possible solution offered by New Games Journalism, attracted plenty of debate, but many of you wanted to see a few more examples of the NGJ style. —Keith Stuart —Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism (Gamesblog) I’ve been kicking around an idea for a games-related writing…
1. The Wall Street Journal is read by people who run the country. 2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. 3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles. 4. USA Today is…
Dozens of parents flooded the Methuen school system with phone calls yesterday after a local newspaper reported that a fourth-grade girl had returned from the February school break requesting to be treated as a boy. The child’s parents told school officials that he had always considered himself a boy, rejecting feminine dress and name, and…
Is anyone else bothered that our primary feedback on our work comes from children? I’m talking, of course, about course evaluations. But if you think about it for a minute, it’s true: most jobs, you complete a project, someone tells you good job (or should). Moreover, the people who observe and evaluate your work are…
“We really shouldn’t be in here…” Saturday afternoons my wife and I have been taking the kids to the local high school for swimming lessons. Carolyn, who turns 3 next month, is in the first class with toddlers, and Peter (who just turned 7) is in the class for older kids. He can swim by…
They avoid books, libraries, and librarians. They love Google. (We love Google.) Why? Maybe it’s the speed of getting thousands of potential answers in a split second (Fig. 11). Maybe it’s the seeming simplicity of the list, or the delight in the reduction of a complex question to a series of puzzle pieces to be…
I recently spent a day shadowing my daughter who is a freshman in a local public high school. The high school that she goes to is considered one of the better high schools within the district (made me cringe to think what must be happening in the schools that are considered bad). An interesting twist…
“We never envisioned that we were going to be playing video game music,” conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya said, drawing appreciative laughter from audience members, many of them in their teens and 20s and decked out in everything from tuxes and gowns to jeans and T-shirts. It was a scene many orchestras would envy at a time…
To many guardians of the knowledge cathedral – librarians, lexicographers, academics – that’s precisely the problem. Who died and made this guy professor? No pedigreed scholars scrutinize his work. No research assistants check his facts. Should we trust an encyclopedia that allows anyone with a pulse and a mousepad to opine about Jackson Pollock’s place…
Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, Truss is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts–for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses. (Unless you are using it to disambiguate items in a…
In one study, Martha Carr, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Georgia, looked at first graders who were learning to add and subtract using “manipulatives,” like counting with their fingers or with beads. Midway through the year, she noticed that most boys were abandoning the manipulatives and were doing the problems in…
There’s certainly nothing new about student blogs – there are millions of them floating in cyberspace. What separates these online journals from the rest of the pack is that they are university sponsored and featured prominently on a school’s admissions pages. These journals are photo heavy and focus on a few events every few weeks.…
Long gone are the days of fast-talking, whiskey-swilling Murray Kempton peers eloquently filling columns with daily dish on government scandals, mobsters and police corruption. The sort of in-your-face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity. When I started out in…
At Kansas State University, the contracts of all faculty members were terminated after a Populist victory in state elections in 1896. Many professors were hired back, but Republicans were removed from the economics department and senior administrative posts. A few years later, Republicans regained control of state politics and did their own purge of the…
Yvonne poured herself a drink and melted into the chair across from Callie. She brushed a strand of moltenly hair from her eyes and proceeded to carve the ham. Callie watched intently. Juice streamed from the ham in rivulets like saliva drooling from the fierce jaws of a wild dingo poised over the dead carcass…
Instead of just putting my CV on the Web like everyone else, I kind of think I would like someone to make a fan site for me, possibly something like the one created for Hasselhoff. Oh, yeah! Check out my experiments with facial hair in the 90s. Instead of building temples to ourselves — which…