By Brian Mathews. Two years ago this week I visited the Googleplex. It was a mind-stretching experience. I also went to PARC, d school, the lobby of IDEO, Facebook, a handful of startups, and a few accelerators. It was a fantastic and exhausting journey. Google stood out for its blend of hospitality and the sheer shock-and-awesomeness of the place. More...
By David Silbey. Everything is older than you think it is:
We interrupt our blogging of Daniel Deronda to share breaking news: In reading some of Robert Herrick’s poetry last night, I discovered what looks to be the first emoticon! It appears at the end of the second line of “To Fortune,” which was published in Hesperides in 1648.
Here’s a scan of the original printing:
Only, no, probably not. As Ben Zimmer at Slate points out, punctuation inside parentheses was fairly common in the 17th century, and there are numerous examples of colons appearing just before a parenthetical close. More...
By David Silbey. I wanted to reiterate the point in this post.
“Free speech rights” and “the First Amendment” are not synonymous with each other. The First Amendment is the American legal manifestation of the right to free speech, but the right exists outside the United States and existed before the first amendment. The Founding Fathers were well aware that they were protecting an existing right with the First Amendment rather than establishing a new one. More...
By Robert Talbert. Back in January I posted an article calling for an end to unsolicited review copies of textbooks being sent to professors. Interestingly, on Reddit a student at my university who works for the mail services department did an AMA, and I had the chance to ask: What kind of impact does it make on the university, from an infrastructure or mail services point of view, to have all these unsolicited books being sent in? Keep in mind that we’re a public university of 24,000 students and lots and lots of faculty. More...
By Vincent DeFrancesco. William Sullivan, a senior scholar for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, writes in Chapter 5 of What Is College For? that the public purposes of professional education were lost as professions migrated toward the academy and away from the apprenticeship training model. The move separated practical and normative considerations of the role and duty of professionals from the cognitive and academic. More...
By Vincent DeFrancesco. In 1976 The New Yorker published a cartoon by Saul Steinberg titled “View of the World From Ninth Avenue.” It depicted Manhattan’s Ninth, 10th, and 11th Avenues as covering more than half the world. Just across the Hudson River sat a sliver of land called “Jersey.” Adjacent to Jersey was a larger rectangle of land, filling perhaps a sixth of the page and representing the remainder of the United States. Across the Pacific lay small specks of land marking China, Japan, and Russia. More...
By Michael McPherson. If colleges follow Bill Bowen’s advice and “untie the knot” between athletics and big-time commercial entertainment, they will also be untying, or at least loosening, the knot that binds colleges to the NFL, the NBA, and the WNBA. Today colleges have a near-monopoly on American students’ access to those leagues, a fact we are reminded of every autumn Sunday, when NFL starters introduce themselves on TV by calling out their college connections (including, of course, THE Ohio State University). More...
By Nigel Thrift. I want to return to the theme of civility that I addressed in a previous post.Modern life can sometimes feel like the jungle. On the Internet, the sheer venom of online attacks is extraordinary to behold and also a bit depressing—people really think this way? The world seems a lot less hospitable, a lot bleaker. Read more...
By Anastasia Salter. If you’ve been hanging out on social media lately someone has probably linked you to an addictive time-wasting number game, 2048. But did you know you can create your own customized version? The free “Make Your Own 2048” tool is delightful to work with, and it’s really easy to make simple changes to the text or create an entire makeover through replacing the number boxes with images. More...
By Konrad M. Lawson. The world of software and online services is a densely populated field of companies who want you to share your to-do list with them. We’ve reviewed some of them here, including Todoist, Gqueues, Wunderlist, Basecamp, and Got Milk?. New options are appearing all the time, but I’ve long been a fan of Omnifocus and have good friends who swear by Things, both of which grow out of the Mac/iOS ecosystem. More...
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