Posts by author
Caroline Kangas
-
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Dan Weiss is away this week. We’ll do our best to get the day started without him. Shower optional: artist documents water balloons exploding on bald women’s heads. Maybe these bikers should’ve showered for the photo? These shattered flowers look…
-
Musings on the Life of the Writer
At The Millions, Emily St. John Mandel offers a peek into her writing world via tangential authors Susanna Moore and our very own Cheryl Strayed. She reposts Cheryl’s Facebook status that lamented the lack of common knowledge regarding writing life:…
-
“Children have a right to free time, to play games in the afternoon.”
Gawker reports on a high-school in Germany that has put a moratorium on homework for younger students in response to the state’s new policy keeping students in school 44 hours per week.
-
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Dan Weiss is away this week. We’ll do our best to get the day started without him. A documentary from Thailand with elephant peg legs. Dumpster diving artists are turning trash into treasure… As another artist puts baroque lamps in the wilderness.…
-
The Future of StoryTelling
On October 5th, a collection of speakers presented their use of technology in modern day storytelling. Featuring innovations beyond flourishy eBooks, the fifteen short films featured on The Future of Storytelling’s site are inspirational and provide a starting point for conversations…
-
“No good writer ever merely cheered us up”
Howard Jacobson writes on “bad boys’ books,” making a case for depressing and difficult literature. He argues that all good books improve the character of the reader, even those that cast ugly characters or that offer the reader only the…
-
New Dictionaries reveal a different liberal and conservative battle
In David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published we learn about the radical Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. The stories behind (and in the pages of) these long-titled books show…
-
“My algorithm told me to arrest this man!”
The Wall Street Journal reviews Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World, by Christopher Steiner. “In the mid-1970s, Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT railed against depriving humans of their capacity to choose, even if computers could decide everything for us.…
-
What’s behind the Music
In his article “Forgetting the Roots: Does it Matter Who Makes Folk Music?” Taylor Coe explores the importance of history for folk musicians and how their creation stories can influence their effect on listeners. Some prefer a little more Strictly Bluegrass…
-
The real Tom Sawyer was a San Francisco Fireman
Not to mention a Mission Street Saloon owner, civil servant, and hero. The Smithsonian Magazine reports on a real-life Tom Sawyer who was one of Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens) drinking buddies during the author’s stay in San Francisco in the…
-
“This is What the Depression Sounded Like”
Aldo Leopold, ecologist and author of Sand County Almanac took such detailed notes each morning from his back porch that researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison have created his “resurrected soundscape” with digital bird calls. “Leopold recognized that you can get a pretty…
-
Two Dollar Radio launches Frequencies
“Scheduled to publish new volumes every Spring and Fall, Frequencies is a journal imprint of Two Dollar Radio that aims to champion artful or creative non-fiction that aggressively asserts the value of the individual, either through story or voice, in…