I'm an academic researcher, and I study writing, learning, and new media. Or, at least, that's the current plan. Newly out of grad school and trying to sort out what comes next ( Read more... )

Writing an inaugural poem has got to be one of the more difficult poetry assignments that exists, and I am fond of this one (although the delivery was a little flat). I liked the images of the ordinary, because an inauguration is made up of citizens, as well as leaders, doing ordinary things, and especially the focus on language, "words spiny or ( Read more... )

Title says it all. I have a soft spot for intelligent animals trying to fight the power, yo.

Annoyed Otto the octopus short-circuits lights

Staff now believe that a bright light shining into his aquarium had annoyed the octopus. He discovered by climbing onto the ring of his tank and squirting a jet of water in the lights direction, it went out.
( Read more... )

In England, there's been a movement to remove a Carol Ann Duffy poem, "Education for Leisure," from the GCSE (lower high school) syllabus because it "glorified knife crime." Duffy's response, in the news and, especially here, in verse, is amazing. And yes, it's a sonnet.

(There's still a part of me that wants to be Marilyn Hacker. Oh yes.)

*

Mrs. ( Read more... )

Hannah Upp was one of my sister's classmates at Bryn Mawr, and she has been missing for a week. I'm trying to help signal boost... so if you happen to see Hannah or come across any information about her, please call the number below ASAP. Here's the official blurb from the Facebook group that her friends have put together:

"Hannah Emily Upp, 23, has ( Read more... )

Once, a few years back, C and I went to the Berkeley Art Museum to see an exhibit of Chinese landscape prints, but we got distracted by a small room of elephant paintings. Paintings by elephants - endangered Thai elephants - not of elephants. Some of the paintings looked like nothing more than random tempera streaks on paper, but after standing in ( Read more... )

Y'all. I am writing my last course paper EVER. It's got five parts, I am finished with 3 1/2 of them. I need to keep the 4th part to no more than 1250 words, and the 5th to about 500. I am turning this mess in, via email, before 4.15, so that I can make it home by 5.00. Hell or high water.

Please feel free to commence the public mocking at 5.00 ( Read more... )

What scares me most about this story is that I am not at all shocked by it. Is this what we've come to? An entire political movement that has come across as so manipulative, so obsessed with winning at any cost, that it doesn't surprise me at all that one of its demagogues would call openly and publicly for violence.
"Riots in Denver, the Democrat ( Read more... )

For the past two days, I have literally had to force myself to do schoolwork because of all of this conversation. The initial storm really tore me up. I was angry, and deeply sad, despite my partial understanding of how and why the OSBP (worst name ever) could have happened the way it happened (cast parties, anyone?). And exhausted, because I ( Read more... )

This is a really old piece (August 2007), but I came across it today in the CNN "most popular" sidebar. Which is a little weird, but leaving that aside...

Gingrich claims here that modern campaigns have gotten too long, too expensive, and verge on insanity. He even claims that the "flip-flopper" media treatment of Kerry was unfair. (Amen to all of ( Read more... )