Moments after Donald Trump was rushed to safety following a failed assassination attempt at a Saturday night rally, some of his supporters turned toward the press pen with obscenities as they fingered reporters for blame. “This is your fault!” one attendee emphatically yelled, pointing at individual journalists as he approached the fence line separating them from attendees.…
Over the past couple of years, researchers at Jigsaw, a Google subsidiary that focuses on online politics and polarization, have been studying how Gen Zers digest and metabolize what they see online. The researchers were hoping that their work would provide one of the first in-depth, ethnographic studies of Gen Z’s “information literacy.” But the…
Joel Lipton, 10 years old at the time, wrote to Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz. Fast-forward to this past February, when Lipton and his wife were cleaning out their closet. […] “Dear Joel,” the letter reads. “I think it is more difficult these days to define what makes a good citizen then it has ever been…
Apple has apologized, but like writer Peter C. Baker, I’m not quite ready to let go of that really horrifying ad depicting a roomful of beautifully displayed musical instruments, sound gear, art supplies, and even toys being slowly squashed by a huge hydraulic press (ostensibly to highlight the creative potential of the latest iPad). Picture…
Have you seen Apple’s “Crush” ad? It features a huge huge hydraulic press crushing musical instruments, art supplies, google-eyed toys, and other beloved artifacts of imagination and creativity. I remember seeing a video years ago that showed how a smartphone replaced a desktop full of tools like a calculator, notepad, rolodex, and so forth. But…
Here’s the underlying problem. We have an operating image of thought, an understanding of what thought is and how to make thought productive of knowledge and truth through the use of various methods. This image and its methods are, of course, products of human history. They change over time, in different cultures, and so on.…
How to Disagree Academically: Using Graham’s “Disagreement Hierarchy” to organize a college term paper.
Some 2300 years ago in ancient Greece, Plato wrote a dialogue featuring his mentor Socrates, who argued that the ability to churn out the longest written compositions on trivial topics or the shortest compositions on important topics is a shallow skill that has nothing to do with human understanding, much like demonstrating that you can…
Anecdote: [A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Persuasion: Logos, Pathos, Ethos and Kairos
Interesting. I don’t particularly care for the title of this YouTube clip, which seems very self-centered and not at all in tune with the message the speaker (Connor Neill) gives. He focuses on that moment when we realize there’s a difference between what we feel we need to say, and what we know the other…
Rewatching ST:DS9 The Ship On a mineral survey of a planet that just happens to look like Southern California, O’Brien trades playful barbs with crewman Muniz. Unlike most episodes where the leads have all the fun, this mission is fairly crawling with random crew we’ve never seen before. An unidentified ship appears randomly and crashes…
Rewatching ST:DS9 After a nightmare featuring dead Klingon children, Worf wakes up in Odo’s security cell. He’s clearly in trouble. A Vulcan admiral convenes a Federation hearing called to explore allegations that, while commanding The Defiant, Worf destroyed a Klingon civilian transport. A Klingon prosecutor, Ch’pok, intends to prove Worf’s negligence, thereby stoking sympathy for…
In September, 2003, I was blogging about What the NY Times called the “campus fad” of Internet plagiarism. “What Does a Professor Do All Day?” (Clearly we are wasting our time whenever we are not standing in front of a classroom.) “Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables“ Leni Riefenstahl Dies (although she distanced…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir reluctantly helps O’Brien clean up before Keiko is due to return after an extended absence. At the family reunion, little Molly points to her mother’s belly and announces she has a little brother. At the request of Kira and her mentor Porta, Sisko blesses a young couple. He’s not thrilled with his…
Rewatching ST:DS9 As The Defiant returns from an uneventful jaunt in the Gamma Quadrant, Dax teases that Worf is in love… with The Defiant. Bashir and O’Brien, dressed as medieval Irish warriors, prepare for a holosuite adventure. Rom, exhausted and overworked, collapses at the bar. Leeta is concerned, but Quark is just annoyed. Bashir confirms…
Jaw-dropping. So creative and joyful.
Sometimes when I’m driving along lost in thought, I flinch. If my son or my daughter asks me what’s wrong, I’m rarely able to articulate an accurate response like, “I just thought of a time before you were born when I should have been kind, and I can’t remember whether I was.” So I usually…