July 2011
35 posts
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Famous Author Rejection Letters →
A list of some rejections that have gone down in history.
My personal favorite:
I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.
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Composition 101: How Email Can Change the Way... →
Learning how to write is tough. To pick up something, you have to practice, and yet in most semester-long English classes, you only get to write a couple essays. Then you only receive feedback after turning in your work — and sometimes it’s not very detailed or helpful at all.
This teacher, though, has the right idea. He’s using email to give students guidance during the writing...
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“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and...”
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Free Range: Birthday Alert →
My ace in the hole as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it.
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And then it all went to hell. The other day, my husband … mentioned during breakfast that it was my cousin’s birthday… . I asked him how he happened to know. He shrugged and said that Facebook told him. … [W]hat exactly does it mean that a task that used to...
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Wikipedia Aims Higher →
Two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework. Many of those campuses have “Wikipedia ambassadors” tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus.
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Kasey Baker, the Western Carolina graduate student who wrote the U.S. nuclear policy article that Wikimedia officials had...
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“My greatest strength is common sense. I’m really a standard brand - like...”
– Katharine Hepburn
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How Handwriting Builds Character →
God, I hated doing cursive in third grade. You remember those big lines we had to practice on? Two solid ones with a dotted line in the middle … ugh. And do I ever use my cursive skillz now? No.
So does it really matter that Indiana banished cursive?
This guy thinks so:
Indeed, my first reaction to the news from Indiana was visceral despair, not only because the world I had known was...
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Week's Eats in Review: Part 2!
La Palapa Cocina Mexicana (East Village - 77 St. Mark’s Pl.)
Went here for lunch with the ed department last week for our meeting. I ordered two tacos - one was “al pastor de pork,” pork rubbed with roasted pineapple and chile, and the other was “tinga del pollo,” BBQ chicken flavored with chile chipotle. Spicy and delicious. Next time I go, I’m getting a...
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Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons →
Posthumous releases, particularly for universally exalted authors, are not rare. But collections of their work in other forms is more unusual, so we have to admit that we’re pretty excited for Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, which will be released by Fantagraphics in December of this year. The book compiles all of the existing cartoons that O’Connor created for her high school and college...
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Human behavior: To resist temptation, forget guilt... →
“The more we anticipate public humiliation and guilt, the worse we’re likely to do when it comes to self-control. If we focus on the pride that comes from good behavior, we make better choices. By far.”
Interesting article about temptation.
Just saying: I would never cheat, but I would definitely eat the chocolate cake.
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How soon will we have flying cars? →
My dream come true!
In 1989’s Back to the Future Part II, Michael J. Fox travels in a DeLorean to the year 2015, when flying cars and hoverboards are the norm. Now, in 2011, that sci-fi fantasy is looking like it could one day be a reality… sort of. Terrafugia, the company that developed the Transition flying car, is one step closer to making its futuristic product available to...
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The Insidious Evils of 'Like' Culture →
Just as stand-up comedians are trained to be funny by observing which of their lines and expressions are greeted with laughter, so too are our thoughts online molded to conform to popular opinion by these buttons. A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn’t retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And...
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Why The Daily Mail's Femail Is Bad For Women →
I don’t mean that women are to blame for the business model that finances most women’s content. That was devised by men, and it usually goes something like this: In order to survive, women’s publications need to attract certain advertisers, the kind who buy ads alongside apolitical content that often suggests ways that women might improve themselves. Probably more often...
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The Perk Bubble is Growing as Tech Booms Again →
My work should definitely start doing stuff like this!
Then there are the regularly scheduled perks at the 120-person vacation-rental marketplace outfit, including Mustache Mondays (employees wear fake ones), Yoga Tuesdays (before company lunch) and Thursday Recess (company-wide kickball).
“Partying like it’s 1999”! (Was it actually like this in 1999?)
Some Web start-ups...
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Double feature of creatures →
Pretty much my worst nightmare:
Just a couple of weeks ago, 55-year-old Jeff Ellis, from Portland, Ore., felt something tickle one of his arms while he dozed during his Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Anchorage … Turned out, the tickle was no joke. A scorpion, which apparently hitched a free ride during the Alaska-bound flight’s stop in Austin, Texas, cozied up to Ellis and then...
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Say Everything →
Because what we’re discussing is something more radical if only because it is more ordinary: the fact that we are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that’s only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely...
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"Underneath the Sycamore" - DCFC
Lying in a field of glass, Underneath the overpass, Mangled in the shards of a metal frame, Woken from the dream by my own name.
Well I was such a wretched man, Searching everywhere for a homeland, And now we are under the same sun, Feel it through the leaves, Let it heal us.
We are the same, We are both safe, Underneath the sycamore. We are the same, We are both safe, Underneath the sycamore.
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Bad Bagels
From Time’s “New York Bagels: An American Tragedy”:
So the bagel became a test case of how you make something commercially viable at the cost of everything that makes it good … People who hadn’t ever encountered a real bagel enjoyed the appearance of something ethnic and exotic without any real difference in taste and texture, and this made the bagel more...
