By Adeline Koh. Despite being open to anyone to edit, Wikipedia has been criticized for its gender gap. To help remedy this, Postcolonial Digital Humanities is organizing a Global Women Write-In (#GWWI) on Wikipedia all-day tomorrow on March 18! More...
By Natalie Houston. When you’re deciding what needs to be done next on a project, or in response to an email, or about that flashing light on your car’s dashboard, how do you decide if it’s something to do right away or something to put on your list for later? Do you have a bunch of emails sitting your inbox that you keep meaning to respond to but you haven’t managed to get around to them yet? The two-minute rule might help. More...
By Amy Cavender. This semester, I’m teaching a survey course in Western political thought that I’ve taught for several years. I decided to try something new in the course this time around, though. Rather than focusing exclusively on the classic texts themselves, I’m also having students engage one contemporary piece of scholarship related to each of the major texts we read. More...
By George Williams. Over at the New York Times “Bits” blog, Nick Bilton reminds us that we should review “who has access to [our] social accounts” from time to time. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn often invite us to link certain services to our accounts, for reasons that vary from making it easier to update multiple accounts at once to being able to authenticate our identity for a third-party service. It’s all too easy to forget just how many of those third-party services have been granted access to our accounts. More...
By Erin E. Templeton. Happy Friday ProfHackers, and happy March Madness for those of you enjoying the tournaments! If basketball isn’t your thing, you can still get in on the fun. This year Out of Print clothing has a Book Madness tournament–their bracket pits heroes vs villains so Moby Dick takes on Humbert Humbert; can Tom Buchanan best Lady MacBeth? Is Voldemort the big bad? Over Satan? For the hero team, can Bilbo Baggins beat Natty Bumpo? Does Scarlett O’Hare stand a chance against Katniss Everdeen? And what’s Othello doing there–surely there is a Shakespearian hero who doesn’t nuder his wife (King Henry perhaps?). Read more...
By Geoffrey Pullum. The alleged chasm that separates American from British English is often discussed in highly emotional terms. It probably won’t make me popular on either side of the Atlantic when I say that I think the differences have been wildly, insanely overstated. To cite just one example, I once met a British woman in Edinburgh who told me loudly and confidently that Americans had completely abandoned the use of adverbs. More...
By Ilan Stavans. In the last few weeks, the topic of my class “Love” has been romantic love, and, within that category, the language of sex. I told students that by language I implied a standardized system of signs that serves to express a wide range of meanings and that by sex—not sexuality but sex—I implied intercourse, that is, sexual intercourse. Sex, then, has its own grammar. More...
By Anne Curzan. See if anything strikes your ear as odd in the following sentence: “A fact like this [that Obama plays golf more with an aide than with John Boehner] can seem to chime with the sort of complaints you hear all the time about Obama. …”
This sentence appeared on Page 49 of the January 27 issue of The New Yorker, in David Remnick’s profile of President Obama, “Going the Distance.” It was pointed out to me by the careful language observer Dave Carlyon, who wrote to me about it because the “chiming” sounded off to him. More...
By Allan Metcalf. In just three days, on March 23, OK will celebrate its birthday, and it’s a milestone one, the 175th. How to celebrate? I’m going to do it with frosted cookies. But the great thing is, any way you celebrate, it’s OK. Like the 4th of July, it can be an occasion for reading aloud the Urtext, the document that started it all. More...
By Ben Yagoda. I think we can all agree that March Madness has jumped the shark. In addition to the actual brackets to the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, one can find mock-brackets for such things as public broadcasting hosts, ESPN personalities, and, courtesy of Jezebel, intoxicants. (In early-round action, Champagne topped Smirnoff Ice, weed blew away crack, Margaritas got the better of rubbing alcohol, and caffeine narrowly edged glue.) More...
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