Since today is a holiday, I’m guessing that many of you won’t be spending extensive time on the interwebs, and I’m not going to test your patience with a lengthy post. Instead, here’s a few tidbits for your enjoyment:

1. New Wes Anderson movie trailer, if you haven’t already seen it. I believe my actual reaction to someone sharing this was, “I just peed a little.”

2. Portland’s version of community libraries.

3. A roundup of religion-approved sex toys. Not just for Christians, either– Jews & Muslims can get some, too.

4. If you thought Bark was a Tebow-free zone, think again, my friends. (And yes, the religious sex toys provided a natural lead-in for this.) To mark his exit from the playoffs and in the hopes that we won’t hear about him for a while– at least until he pays for more obnoxious ads during the Super Bowl– I give you…Tebowie.

5. For all you Apple diehards: NPR wants you to know where and how all those great products are made.

If you’re lucky enough to have the day off, enjoy the hell out of it, all right?

Jill Abramson

In March there was much debate about whether people would begin subscribing to the New York Times since the newspaper began charging for previously free online access. I decided that I would finally make good and subscribe. One of the reasons I hadn’t yet was because the massive amount of paper involved in a daily newspaper subscription horrifies me. But with the new subscriptions, online-only access was going to be an option—the perfect option for me.

The weird thing is that I continued to be able to click on what seemed like unlimited articles each month. This is where the first of two embarrassing parts of this post comes in. After telling people, with pride, that I read the New York Times online, I discovered I had never read more than the 20 free articles in a month. I don’t suppose reading less than one article a day really counts as being a legitimate “reader” of a newspaper. Read more »

Looks like the logo of an evil spy-movie corporation. For all your concerns about messaging, DARPA, you sure seem to be doing it wrong (Photo Credit: DARPAOutreach).

So in my student-teaching gig over at Bancroft Alternative, we’ve  been busy building rapport by discussing how storytelling shapes and defines human experience. From classic literature and poetry to the writing in modern hip-hop and video-games, story is everywhere, I tell my students. It’s a compelling idea, and it’s been a great way to engage kids who’ve been otherwise inured to learning by a society that still views them as bottom-feeders, as the dregs. This is what I tell them: Stories can have meaning, sure, but they can also be a form of connection with other people; stories can share, empathize ,convince, impart identity. Told effectively, they can even imbue a sense of purpose.

Now, in the context to which I’m currently applying the doctrine, storytelling sounds really positive. Right? Right. That is to say, it does so until I open up Wired and find this article by Dawn Lim, who reports that US defense-skunkworks DARPA is busy tooling around with what they call the “neurobiology of narratives.” Put simply, DARPA seeks to decode and understand the neurochemistry of storytelling, seeking to map how narrative affects the brain-chemistry of potential terrorists. They’re basically looking for the biochemistry of story and belief, in the hopes of predicting future terrorist actions or counteracting with their own propaganda.  The project name sounds like a LinkedIn group for MFAs: “Narrative Networks.”

Read more »

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

(Author’s note: Forgive me. I know it isn’t my day, but I felt that something needed to be said. – S.M.)

I owe a lot to Steve Jobs. The Apple II was one of the first machines I ever explored, from kindergarten on through grade-school. I know that Jobs wasn’t involved with Apple at that time, having been forced out of the company shortly after my birth; still, it was his company, always was, and his ingenuity allowed those computers to be there in the first place. It allowed me those first tentative interactions with technology.

Later, as an angry misfit junior-higher, my school’s guidance counselor used to man the computer labs after-hours, allowing us free reign of all the Macintosh computers and educational software he had available. I explored audio editing and computer-aided design; I drew my first digital illustration (a supernova), traversed early 3D-rendered environments, and even explored 3D Atlas, a mid-90′s precursor to Google Earth. I wrote my first short story on a Macintosh. In a very real sense, the company that Steve Jobs created got me started on the path to writing. Read more »

"We lost good people on that server."

In case some of our readers hadn’t figured it out yet, I’m a bit of a geek. I may be a student of the humanities but I love science, I love technology, and my other big passion besides writing is video-games. It could be argued that the 1996 PC title Riven, a haunting game that explored the wonders and ethical dangers of storytelling, was actually responsible for my initial desire to write. I’ve found it compelling over the last decade to watch as electronic media emerges as an art form unto itself, and I follow developments related to that sphere with great interest.

Of course, as with any innovation, the results are not always shiny-happy-progress. Sometimes the results are actually harmful; more often than not, though, they’re just stupid. Kotaku’s Brian Crecente reports that a recent documentary by UK studio ITV features purported footage of “IRA terrorists” armed with Libyan anti-aircraft weapons, shooting down a Royal Army helicopter in 1988. The footage, while certainly riveting, is actually gameplay from 2009′s online combat shooter ARMA II. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen ARMA being played, and the graphics are quite good, if a bit dated. On the average low-quality TV screen some viewers, unfamiliar with modern conveniences like “video games” or “that awful rock-and-roll music,” would likely not even notice. That said: come on, guys. ITV claims this was a mix-up over use of the wrong clip, but any video editor worth his salt should have picked up on this right away. The glitchy, stilted movements of the soldiers in the beginning should have been a dead giveaway. Read more »

look, ma, i'm in the news *sent from an iphone

Yesterday, Jason posted about companies ditching fulltime employees for freelancers, and hypothesized that freelance gigs will only get outsourced. The big East will replace him. Based off of a quick glance of Chinglish Fail, I want to say: Easy Tiger, fall down carefully. All your base are belong to us.

I’m not afraid of China. I am afraid of Narrative Science. Narrative Science, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a company that makes computer-generated journalism. A few algorithms can pull together sabermetrics, Wikipedia, and a photo and compose a sports story. Or election information, financial reports, market research, and local news. The question is: will the computer put journalists out of work? Or maybe even kill the field of journalism?

I’m imagining a future where the local news doesn’t poll Facebook users for a little Beat on the Street section (“What do you think about the recent snowstorm? Send us a pic!”), but will be entirely woven from status updates, photographs, event pages, and open notes. It will work like Watson and Google Translate and however Narrative Science works, relying on what’s already been said to articulate a synopsis of current events. We will all be citizen journalists, for better or worse. Our typos and 1337 shortcuts will be the New Journalism. Crash blossoms will fill headlines. News will be half gossip. The public and the private spheres will finally, totally fuse. We will protest and then accept. English will get weirder.

And then, in ten years, Narrative Science will use your Gmail account and write a memoir for you, sell it as an ebook for $3.99 on Amazon, and you’ll get a tiny percentage of the cut and a lot of public embarrassment. After all, even a kid in China costs a lot these days. 

Which Student Are You?

I think you’re supposed to do the butterfly through seas of academic research, and I can only do the doggy paddle. In any case, I’ve been submerged for days and my head probably hasn’t dipped under as much as it’s supposed to, but I’m getting the gist of what’s down there below the surface.

I’m looking into research that helps explain mental shortcuts people make in order to take stances on complex topics without knowing much about them. These are some of the things research has found that we do:

We fit ourselves into identity groups and align our views with others in our groups. Then, as we see additional information about a given controversial topic, we take note of the parts that reinforce our own view of how the world should be. Also, we tend to ascribe the greatest level of authority to those who represent our own views.

The result? We tend to become increasingly polarized on issues even as we are exposed to balanced arguments and data.

At this point, you may not be stunned. But the most interesting part of the research I’m looking at is the way in which this power team* has grouped us. Read more »

Last week, I bought myself a Macbook Pro. It’s shiny and beautiful and oh so much faster than my old laptop. But it’s empty. I don’t have a case for it. I haven’t put any cute/funny/weird stickers on it. I haven’t even bought Microsoft Office (though some people might say that’s a good thing). What I do have is a $100 gift card for the app store. So Mac lovers, you tell me: what software/accessories are must haves for my shiny new companion?

What I did over my summer vacation

You know how, as writers, we often feel ineffectual and separate from all those other people in the world? Okay, maybe I’m just speaking for myself, or for poets. Alright, for myself.

Regardless, the question of the usefulness of writing is one that I’ve been asked more than once in more than one venue. I remember just a few months ago one of my well-meaning developmental writing students came into my office, presumably to cheer me up or something, when he said something like, “Jaime, I have to be honest with you. You’ve seemed really tired this quarter, and I just don’t know if teaching writing is worth wearing yourself out over. I mean, seriously, I’m not going to use this stuff outside of school, and I don’t think most other people do either.” Sigh. He was right, I was tired, but not of teaching writing or even of hearing students tell me things like that. He was, after all, telling me the truth as he experiences it.

Besides, there was some wisdom in his statement. A lot of students really don’t use the academic skills we teach them: MLA format, essay organization, how to locate a scholarly article on a library database…. But, whether they know it or not, they do use the less tangible, more cognitive skills we teach them: to look deeply at a text, to analyze an argument, to question authority.

These are the reasons I enjoy teaching college composition, but I often struggle with the applicability of it. When, as my student asked implicitly, will they ever use the academic skills I’m charged with teaching them? When will essays ever become relevant to anyone outside of academia?

I know of at least two places (I’m sure there are more.) where essays are not only relevant, they are promoting social change. The first is my own, newly started nonprofit organization, Dream School Commons. The second is Eastern Washington University alumnus Ross Carper’s website, Beyond the Bracelet.

Read more »

"Of course not. This is a very lovely room of death."

I saw an ad recently for the now near-ubiquitous Kindle and thought of the troubles being faced by hard-copy bookstores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble (Not exactly timely, I know, but then again you don’t rush miracles kid). It got me thinking about the changing shape of literature, and about the opining I’ve seen on the threat that online publishers pose to authors and booksellers. I understand that people are resistant to change, and I even feel a twinge of fear myself that my beloved medium might be going the way of compact-discs, but I wonder: in increasingly digital and resource-starved world, how much hand-wringing nostalgia can we afford?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I know there’s something to be said for the pleasures of a printed work — the permanence, the sense of validation, even the simple tactile enjoyments like the smell of the binding. I get that there are certain things an e-reader can’t ever hope to reproduce. What I think is happening here is that private booksellers are being forced to contend with an increasingly open-source market, much as music vendors went through in the early 2000′s. I also think there are some lessons in this parallel, chief among them: don’t count on IP statutes or your own monolithic status to save you. Borders, to me, is just one casualty of a evolutionary cycle in commerce, but what I find interesting is the lack of an ethical perspective in this debate. We’re lamenting that these changes are happening, but we’re not asking if maybe they should. Read more »