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Scholarly writing gets hijacked, interpretation is a wild ride
photo credit: smemon87 After reading violent threats against Frances Fox Piven online, my first thought was “If books are so powerful, then why threaten with a gun—go and write your own book.” Hannah...
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The Imitation Game
We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. –Alan Turing, 1950 In 1950, Alan Turing theorized a test of computer intelligence. The experiment he...
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Stitch and Ink
Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, talk focused on strategies for teaching close reading. Unanimous nodding broke out when John H. mentioned the importance...
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Horror-Movie Capitalism?
As Tina’s post earlier this week attests, the ideas of Karl Marx live on, in ever clever guises. Her anonymous student vociferously wished to avoid intellectual contact with the thinker/giant bronze...
View Article“Got to celebrate it!”
Over the past six months or so, what amounts to a thin, loose thread of comedy-citing musings has wound its way into Cacophony. Credit Alessandro for leading the way, in posts on Reggie Watts,...
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The War on Cliché
Throughout history, student writers have used generalizations. In society today, everybody likes to make broad, sweeping statements and to repeat clichés. As the saying goes, great writing is timeless....
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Occupation Communication
The Occupy Wall Street protests (which my colleagues have written about here and here) started to gain traction as a national news story this past week. Coverage of the protests increased as more...
View ArticleBeing versus becoming bi/multilingual
In my today’s post I will return to the topic already discussed here: growing up multilingual, the topic personally close to my heart (and to several other fellows e.g. see Agnieszka’s past post Ciao!...
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Supertitles
This past week, David Henry Hwang’s new comedy Chinglish opened on Broadway. The play, as all of the advertising for the production will tell you, is “the hilarious story” of cross-cultural...
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Stay, Staying, Sted? Who is Teaching these Kids Grammar?!
Note: It is somewhat hypocritical for me to complain about people’s grammar. A member of my dissertation committee has repeatedly urged me to purchase a grammar book and alludes that my unedited...
View ArticleThe Genealogy of Communication Courses and CAC (Part 2 of 3)
This is a continuation of my earlier post in which I try to trace the evolution of communication courses. As I wrote previously, the idea of the communication course first arose in the mid 1940s when...
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My stress response to oppositional, religious language in the political interweb
The Slavoj Zizek, “Actual Politics” essay went around Facebook and several sites linked to it this past December. Zizek’s use of religious language got my attention right away, and as I continued to...
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Re-imagining Africa in the Digital Age
How is Africa imagined in the 21stcentury? What notions does Africa conjure in the minds of a casual observer? As a continent constantly mired in crisis, the site of humanitarian disasters, prone to...
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To Be or Not To Be
A few years ago I came across an anecdote by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh that’s stuck with me since. The tale goes something like this: A healthy child is born to a well-off family and all his neighbors...
View ArticleHow Is the Way We Communicate Changing?
Images are used to communicate information to us much more often than any other form of information and the reasons for that are well-established. We process visual information in a much more...
View ArticleArticle 4
I fucking hate blogs, but I’m obliged to do this 5 times for reasons I’ll explain later. So, for my first one, I thought I’d just introduce some questions. No one’s watching, so if you’re bothering to...
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Chillax peeps.
Dissertation writing can be an arduous process, obvs. It can also be enlightening about your use of language. Do you know how many times I’ve used the word “influence” in my dissertation draft?...
View ArticlePastor McRemus’ Sermon on Academics, ctd.
At the request of the author, we have unpublished “Pastor McRemus’ Sermon on Academics.” All of the comments were unpublished with the post. The author writes: It was only speech. It caused no actual...
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Interviews (not the academic kind)
This is a piece about using technology to document and preserve as well as connect anew. It is also about advocating for audio documentation as a break from the insistent and incessant visual realm....
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The Rhetoric of “um so like…”
In a book review for Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution, another one of those humanities-in-decline books, I read this: At a gathering of the Cultural Studies Association at the University of...
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