New video from NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover chronicles major milestones during the final minutes of its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet on Feb. 18 as the spacecraft plummeted, parachuted, and rocketed toward the surface of Mars. A microphone on the rover also has provided the first audio recording of sounds…
Years later, after earning my degree in Jazz Performance from Howard University, I joined a country band where I was the only Black member. It was 1983 when we visited Frederick, Maryland, and played at an all-white bar (a bar where Blacks were legally allowed to enter but wouldn’t be welcomed). After I finished a…
Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting For Godot was once famously described as ‘the play where nothing happens – twice.’ First produced in French and then re-written by Beckett into English, it remains one of the most significant plays of the twentieth century. Beckett described it as a tragi-comedy: it has as much comedy within the characters and…
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I often invite my colleague Kelly Clever to give the “library session” to my freshman writing students. Of course there’s only so much anyone can accomplish in a single session, but my students often credit her for helping them make the leap from a general idea to a well-formed research question. Maybe they end up…
If it were possible to build a digital novelist or poetry analyst, then computers would be far more powerful than they are now. They would in fact be the most powerful beings in the history of Earth. Their power would be the power of literature, which although it seems now, in today’s glittering silicon age,…
I already bought the thing, and I’m only looking in the manual because I can’t figure out what’s wrong with the non-working piece of junk, so I don’t really want to read a chipper note congratulating me on my purchase. People hate reading instructions, and will only glance at them after they are already frustrated…
The pandemic sucks. We’re spending more time with a smaller circle of people, and tensions can mount. But I’m grateful my family is together, and grateful for our health. Sure, things could be better. Recently in my email I found this reflection on the benefits of being in a relationship. 4 Main Benefits of Being…
Today, February 18, 2021 at 20:44 UTC (3:44 p.m. Eastern US time), if all goes well, another robotic rover will land on the planet Mars. —Bad Astronomy Similar:AI Agents Are Terrible Freelance WorkersAI is getting better at rote tasks, but …BusinessIf you win the very first time you play a game, that means you are…
Technology is wonderful. My journalism students prefer to conduct their interviews by emails, but the word “interview” defines a back-and-forth exchange where the reporter can respond to body language and other subtle cues that don’t make it into emailed responses. Also, it takes non-trivial effort for interview subjects to write out their answers, only a…
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On Nov. 14, 1889, Bly waved goodbye to family and friends from the New Jersey Hoboken Pier aboard the Augusta Victoria steamer. Traveling by steamships and trains, her journey sent her around the world from America to England, France, Italy, Egypt, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Japan, and back to a port in San Francisco. She then traveled by train across the U.S., with four major stops including Harrisburg, Pa., before arriving back in New Jersey on Jan. 25, 1890.
A Texas lawyer accidentally left a kitten filter on during a video conference call with a judge and was unable to change it, eventually responding to a judge’s query about why he was being addressed by a digital feline by saying: “I’m here live. I am not a cat.” Later, the judge wrote: “These fun…
I’ve taken over teaching the English department’s relatively new career focus sequence, so I’m more than usually invested in these ideas. It’s time for faculty and administrators to be blunt: postgraduation success, more than ever, requires a demanding curriculum that includes extensive writing, facility with data and statistics, and extensive opportunities for collaboration and critical…
The media constantly takes things I say and then repeats them on their news shows and in their magazines, and they always leave something out, like the thing I haven’t even said yet that lets you know I don’t believe the thing I already said. If the media wants to be completely accurate, they should…
Enjoyed watching the restored version of the hugely influential 1927 sci-fi movie #Metropolis I hadn’t seen any of the 20m or so of restored footage. Added main title music was good, but repetitive and not always emotionally aligned with the story. The print was very clear, with crisp details. Nothing like the version I saw…
August Wilson’s Century Cycle > Spoiler-free scene breakdown Premiered: 1999; Broadway 2001 Setting: 1985; backyard of row houses; Pittsburgh Hill District Prologue (starry night) Stool Pigeon, clicking ham bones, monologues to an offstage cat (which belongs to Aunt Ester). “The story’s been written. All that’s left now is the playing out.” I.i King (30s), ex-con…
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