Playing catch-up here with links to sundry articles:
1. Writing and reading as more interactive than before. (via The Dish)
2. Food stamp participation by county.
3. U.S. students make up the largest proportion of top-scoring students. It turns out that we don’t need education reform so much as we need poverty reform.
4. We have relationships with our dogs, which relationships we can tell stories about; but we only look at our cats, of whom we make images. Thus, there are more books about dogs but online video and photos of cats. From my experience living with both, I’d say that’s about right.
5. The first World Wide Web page, recreated. Already, I feel like a oldster, telling my students of the days when I was first online, 1992, when I used the Gopher program to find addresses of people at other universities, and when I had email but only had two or three other people with whom to communicate online. I liked this story above for both the Gopher mention and for the screen image from NeXT computers, which I also used in fall 1992 and which now seems like the Edsel of computers.
6. The New York Times Book Review may be on its last legs. , and with it, “Book reviews, I am afraid, are a downer, an outdated form. Literary editors – hell, literary people in general – are mightily outdated, too.” And as much as I enjoyed reading the Book Review as a younger person who wished to participate in the community represented by the Book Review, I’m not sure any more that the end of “literary people” is necessarily a bad thing. “Literary culture” now seems an idea founded as much on myth and opinion and posturing as much as anything else.
7. Birth of a new conjunction: “slash.”
8. What you eat help forms what you like to eat.
9. A “Lord of the Flies” real-life adventure that wasn’t so “Lord of the Flies”-ish at all. :
One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip. They left safe harbor, and fate befell them. Badly. Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel, because they could see that arguing could lead to mutually assured destruction. They promised each other that wherever they went on the island, they would go in twos, in case they got lost or had an accident. They agreed to have a rotation of being on guard, night and day, to watch out for anything that might harm them or anything that might help. And they kept their promises—for a day that became a week, a month, a year. After fifteen months, two boys, on watch as they had agreed, saw a speck of a boat on the horizon. The boys were found and rescued, all of them, grace intact and promises held.
10. A post about literary pets contains this quotation from William S. Burroughs about his cats:
Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience — any fucking thing. Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love.
Love? What is It?
Most natural painkiller what there is.
11. Pictures from the frontlines of TV news on-location reports, showing some of what the edited image excludes. This reminds me of some of the press conferences I went to as an agriculture reporter, where my first-person accounts could have easily been more interesting to read than the items being conferred.
12. Media reporting tends to misunderstand and misstate science results.
13. Andrew Sullivan considers how a lot of online media exposure may influence/alter our thinking.
MonkeyMoonMachine 