Posts by author
Jack Taylor
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Ward Off Your Enemies With Shakespearean Verve
Jazz musician Pete Levin has provided a quick and easy way to verbally shatter any foe with Ye Olde Official Shakespearean Insult Kit. Users are given four fields – an introductory phrase field and three adjective fields – with which…
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An Alternative To The Euro
The Wall Street Journal covers a group in the Catalonia region of Spain that, in response to the country’s current economic crisis, has created an alternative form of currency – the Eco. “The Eco is exchangeable through checks, electronic payments, and even a mobile…
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An Interview With Austin Kleon
Rumpus contributor Andrew David King interviews Austin Kleon at The Kenyon Review’s blog. Kleon has a knack for altering a text to make it his own, and talks at length about creative originality: “I guess what I’m interested in is why ‘originality’ is a…
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Twitter Can Help You Steer Clear Of Potty Mouths
The Atlantic covers a recent study that uses twitter to analyze where the United State’s most profanity prone individuals reside: “The Ukrainian-based web development firm Vertaline, aiming to answer that question, scanned tweets posted from across 462 specific locations in the U.S. The team…
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Sending Vibes Through Squids
BoingBoing documents the research of Backyard Brains, which, as of late, has consisted of monitoring how playing Cyprus Hill affects a squid’s chromatophores. The results look not unlike an iTunes Visualizer: “Greg Gage of the DIY neuroscience company Backyard Brains stimulated the axons…
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A Die-Hard Fan’s Lament
Rumpus columnist Steve Almond, an unwavering Oakland Raiders fan, writes for The New York Times about being a true sports fan, specifically a fan of a floundering team: “As I prepare to immerse myself in another season of ill-fated devotion, there is…
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Opening Day For reKiosk
reKiosk is officially up and running! The site functions as a platform for artists to sell their music, books, and any other digital file directly to their fans, as well as being a social networking site to connect said artists and fans:…
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A Glimpse Into Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
The Millions allows readers the opening paragraphs of DT Max’s David Foster Wallace biography: “The Wallaces ate at 5:45 p.m. Afterward, Jim Wallace would read stories to Amy and David. And then every night the children would get fifteen minutes…
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“Corpse Orders”
The newest addition to the Lapham’s Quarterly “Voices in Time” series unearths a text from c. 700 China instructing spellmen on unearthing jewels buried with the dead: “Then proceed into a tumulus and select an adult male corpse—a body without the marks…
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“My American Dream Sounds Like Blackstar”
Teju Cole writes for NPR about how Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s collaborative project Black Star perfectly encapsulates the experience of living in New York: “But, shorn of musical accompaniment, we also recognize that these are the best words in the best…
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How Critics Affect Artists
An artist’s work can take years to complete, while a critic’s take on said art can be formulated in a matter of hours. This distinction is pointed out early on in Richard Brody’s discussion of criticism at The New Yorker. …
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A Soldier’s Handbook
The New York Review of Books covers the recently published guidebook given to American soldiers before heading to Vietnam: “Most American soldiers landing in Vietnam in the 1960s were handed a ninety-three-page booklet called A Pocket Guide to Vietnam. Produced by the Department…