Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus wins Nobel literature prize Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature Oct. 8 for works that the prize judges called “a monument to suffering and courage.” Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich wins Nobel Prize in literature Mashable! Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for works that … Read more
The Martian and the Cult of Science Slate Articles by Rachel E. Gross Ridley Scott’s The Martian opens with an unsolvable problem: It’s 2030, and the crew of NASA’s Mars spaceship the Hermes has just left astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) stranded on Mars. Watney’s situation is not good. Utterly alone, wounded by spaceship debris, and … Read more
On the declining ebook reading experience kottke.org by Jason Kottke When reports came out last month about declining ebook sales, many reasons were offered up, from higher pricing to the resurgence of bookstores to more efficient distribution of paper books to increased competition from TV’s continued renaissance, Facebook, Snapchat, and an embarrassment of #longread riches. What … Read more
What You Need to Know to Be Culturally Literate in 2016 Wired Top Stories by Robert Capps Here’s a cheat sheet of everything you need to know to understand what’s happening in science, culture, security, business, and design. Feel free to take notes. UC Berkeley issues first-ever university transparency report Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow April writes, … Read more
An Academic Journal About Leisure Exists, and It’s Amazing Wired Top Stories by Sarah Zhang Peruse at your leisure. Tolstoy and Gandhi Exchange Letters: Two Thinkers’ Quest for Gentleness, Humility & Love (1909) Open Culture by Josh Jones Some of the most rigorous moral thinkers of the past century have spent time on the wrong side of … Read more
IFLA Publishes a Statement on Privacy in the Library Environment At its 14 August 2015 meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, the IFLA Governing Board endorsed an IFLA Statement on Privacy in the Library Environment. The FAIFE Committee oversaw preparation of the Statement and benefitted from consultation with IFLA units and various Internet civil liberties advocacy … Read more
Gallery: 13 images that helped define the look of the electronic age Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow A full-color, large-format exploration of the electronic age, INSIDE THE MACHINE explains the history of technology through over 150 images from magazines, industry pamphlets, and out-of-print books to showcase the powerful graphic and artistic representations of this burgeoning field. … Read more
Stop thinking of professors as old white men dressed in tweed Mashable! by Rebecca Ruiz Search for images of a “professor” on Google and this is what you’ll find: a cornucopia of older white men standing authoritatively in front of a chalkboard. This tired cliché has become the target of #ILookLikeaProfessor Theodor Adorno’s Seminal Critical Theory Text … Read more
British Library releases over a million public domain images Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder The British Library uploaded over one million scanned images to Flickr, designating them as public domain for all to share and use. Quartz has an article about the project. Five American Authors Make the Longlist for 2015 Man Booker Prize Writerswrite.com’s Writer’s Blog … Read more
Roberto Bolaño’s 12 Tips on “the Art of Writing Short Stories” Open Culture by Josh Jones For some certain romantic reasons, a segment of the English-language reading population fell in love with Roberto Bolaño in the first few years of this millennium. One invariably glimpsed Bolaño’s award-winning 1998 novel The Savage Detectives on endtables and nightstands after its translation in 2007, … Read more
Five politics classics every activist should know about open Democracy News Analysis – by Tom Butler-Bowdon And they’re not all what you think… 1. Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals (1971) The McCarthy era decimated the ranks of American radicals, yet it did not stop the disillusionment that America’s young felt in the 1960s about politicians and … Read more
Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters Open Culture by Josh Jones It’s easy to think of Franz Kafka as a celibate, even asexual, writer. There is the notable lack of eroticism of any recognizable sort in so much of his work. There is the prominent biographical detail—integral to so many interpretations—of his outsized fear of his father, … Read more
—– http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/may/academic-council-teaching-050115.htmlStanford Report, May 1, 2015 Academic Council considers role of technology in teaching and learning The role of technology in teaching and learning was the focus of President John Hennessy’s annual address to the Academic Council on Thursday. Also announced was the upcoming 2015-16 Year of Learning, which will spur discussion about teaching, learning … Read more
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Shapes of Stories” as an infographic poster Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder A Good Professor Is an Exhausted Professor Slate Articles by Rebecca Schuman In higher-ed parlance the herculean act of teaching eight courses per year is what’s known as “a 4-4 load” or, alternatively, a “metric ass-ton” of classroom time. And yet a new bill … Read more
The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? Eager to find out what impact blogging and social media could have on the dissemination of her work, Melissa Terras took all of her academic research, including papers that have been available online for years, to the web and found that her audience … Read more