By Lucy Ferriss. I’ve just returned from France, and the glow has not worn off. What glow, you ask? Would that be the long dinners over excellent wine, finished off with a plate of delectable stinky cheeses? The gilded sunsets over the Loire Valley? The newly refinished tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn, with their mysterious sixth sense. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. The summer I was 20, I hatched the insane plan of riding the moped I’d purchased at my job in France through England and Scotland and over to my mother’s ancestral home in Ireland. Various near-disasters ensued, not the least of them occasioned by my ignorance of a war that was then raging directly along my path through Northern Ireland. But the daily challenge was the rain. More...
By Ben Yagoda. Toward the end of NPR’s Planet Money podcast last week, the host, Jacob Goldstein, said: “You can tweet at us at ‘planetmoney.’ You can tweet at me at ‘jacobgoldstein.’” More...
By Ben Yagoda. Catching up on New Yorkers, I happened on a poem by John Koethe, which begins:
It’s a great poem, but, needless to say, what mainly interested me was Koethe’s use of covers band instead of cover band — to mean a musical combo whose repertoire consists of songs popularized by other performers. More...
By Allan Metcalf. A language is a dialect with an army and navy, as the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich once supposedly said. We could update that to say a language is a dialect with an army, navy, and Silicon Valley, and it’s that, not any intrinsic merit, that makes English the dominant language of the world so far this century. More...
By Allan Metcalf. Hack, hack, hack!
What’s that?
It’s the sound of a nation of hackers. That’s us in the 21st century.
Not so long ago, in the previous century, a hack was just a term at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an ingenious solution to a problem. More...
By William Germano. It’s commencement season, and we all faced once again the last-minute fumble to figure out a pronunciation for Latin honorifics.
The responsibility for enunciating such things before a rapt audience of parents and well-wishers may fall on different shoulders depending on the institution, but if you’re an academic, there’s an excellent chance you’ll face the problem at one time or another. More...
By Jason B. Jones. One exciting aspect of digital humanities work is its openness to collaboration, including collaboration with students. As someone who used to coordinate an undergraduate research program, I’ve always been particularly excited about opportunities to involve students in meaningful research–and participating actively in an ongoing research project certainly counts. Read more...By Jason B. Jones. In May, Amy wrote suggested Sunrise as an interesting cross-platform calendar option, right before it was bought by Microsoft. I don’t use Sunrise myself (Fantastical for life), but their most recent version does have a feature that led me to install it: The ability to send invitations via any iOS or Android app that accepts text input. Read more...By Jason B. Jones. What with all the news from Wisconsin and North Carolina and, let’s face it, the whole world of public higher education, it can seem legitimately overwhelming/despairing. One concrete thing to do would be to improve one’s faculty activism skills, and the best place to do that is the AAUP’s Summer Institute. It’s a three-day boot-camp in organizing one’s colleagues, talking to the media, pressuring senior administrators, and much else. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
