The New York Times Makes The Nerdiest Correction Ever – Featured on BuzzFeed. Similar:How dual loyalties created an ethics problem for Chris Cuomo and CNN An editorial on on the firing of CNN’s…Current_EventsJournalists dream of puns like this.Amusing'Inappropriate' dance moves lead to calls for student lessons in Peters Mr. Merrell said the students told h…AmusingChoose…
A neighbor invited us over to help feed the lambs they are raising in their garage. (The mother sheep died, and her lambs needed more care than the owners could manage.) The lambs are Piccolo and Brown Sugar. Similar:Be Kind, for Everyone You Meet Is Misattributing This Quote in a MemeBe kind, for everyone you…
Great piece from Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica. Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered “yes” to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after…
McSweeney’s: Horatio thinks he saw a ghost. Hamlet thinks it’s annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies. The king thinks Hamlet’s annoying. Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better. Hamlet’s father is now a zombie. Thanks for the suggestion, Mike. (Twitter would probably catch the back-and-forth spirit of a drama a…
“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,…
Testing my new RSS feed I am having some trouble coding up my new RSS feed. If you’ve got a content aggregator, and you’d like to let me know how my feed works for you, please let me know. BTW… What’s a content aggregator? Similar:The Amazon Mystery: What America's Strangest Tech Company Is Really Up…
My classes are generally small enough that I have time to get to know each student’s writing. When a student who confuses “bias” and “biased” in a hand-written response later that day sends me an email later that day that uses “whom” and “betwixt,” I notice. I can’t prove a student is abusing AI, but…
I miss the convention in movies and TV shows in which the main characters visit a music hall or club, and we watch them watching an entire number. Maybe they exchange a few lines during a musical bridge, but mostly they’re just in character, sitting through a performance. I have only fragmentary memories of H.R.…
If you have ever experienced this, you might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration—Wait, what is this exactly?—before you begin to wonder if the sender simply used AI to generate large blocks of text instead of thinking it through. If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped. —Harvard Business Review
Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir scolds Martok for injuring himself (again) during a holosuite training program. (He’s being reckless and self-destructive, even for a Klingon.) On the Defiant, Nog stealthily pantomimes strangling Worf for ordering him to download an operating system “one file at a time.” (The intended comedy in this scene is a bit awkward; Nog’s…
Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage. I’m almost at the halfway point of editing 35 short videos from the 2025 York Plays, presented in Toronto by a troupe of hundreds of performers in June. The event was a textually faithful but theatrically creative staging of some 50 plays that were performed as…
A cast of hundreds participated in a public medieval re-enactment dramatizing the Christian story from Creation through Final Judgement at the University of Toronto a few weeks ago. I attended as the event videographer. I had at least three cameras running at all times — sometimes five — while a roving camera also caught the…
Pope Leo XIV, in his first address to journalists at the Vatican, called for the release of imprisoned journalists, championed the free press, and urged caution about AI. My social media feed is full of memes that purport to represent the words of Leo XIV. Legitimate news sources have already published stories about Pope Leo…
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the reference.) I’m doing a lot more in-class work with paper, giving students handouts to annotate in class, asking them to write in copybooks. For the midterm I gave students a short academic article, excerpts from a play we haven’t read…
In the halls of power at Amazon, busy executives have no time for PowerPoints. At the start of a meeting, everyone gets a printed 6-page memo, and spends 20-25 minutes reading it silently and marking it up. After the discussion, the printouts (typically with detailed hand-written comments) are handed back to the person who called…
It was not that hard to leave Twitter. I removed the app from my phone and followed a lot of journalists and professionals on Bluesky. I still checked Twitter on my laptop, but not every day. Then one day when X asked me for my password to log back in, I decided not to bother.…
I’m far from perfect, and injustice and suffering and tragedy in the world won’t be much affected by the story I’m about to narrate, but as I was walking in the mall with my son, I dictated a 500-word email response to a student whose paper topic didn’t work out and who asked for my…
My job is often to help students understand things that they aren’t good at doing yet. If a student arrives in my classroom with a solid ability to construct clear sentences and summarize difficult readings, using an AI tool that helps them spot grammar mistakes with less effort and capture the gist of a reading…
What is a double-entry research journal?
Reading with a highlighter in your hand encourages you to agree with or ignore what you read. That’s a very limited way to engage with a text.
By contrast, double-entry notes are a way of making complex connections between different things that you read.
My students often tell me that when they take good double-entry notes, they get a much better paper when the time comes for them to start actually churning out the paragraphs.
In my lit classes, I’m definitely teaching more short stories and fewer novels that I used to. I’ve expanded the time I spend on note-taking, synthesizing quotes from different sources, and why at the college level it’s not a good paragraph if it simply introduces “One quote that supports my position,” repeats three or four…