Posts by author
Lyz Lenz
-
Obeying the Gods of Small Things
If the ephemeral objects were not collected, and if the journalistic, social-science reports not commissioned, and if all of it were not preserved, then no one would believe that such a place had existed; not on the moon, but right…
-
Telling Digital Stories in the Classroom
A communications law professor offers this tale of integrating digital storytelling in the classroom: After all, we tell our students in courses focusing on skills that online tools are excellent opportunities to engage in some fantastic storytelling. Why not encourage…
-
Weekly Geekery
As if you needed another reason to hate the Internet. Here you go, Luddite. Can a monkey own a picture? Wikipedia thinks so. Need to measure your soul? There is an app for that. Life at the edge of connectivity.…
-
Seeing Literature
In the New Yorker, Peter Mendelsund talks about designing book covers for iconic works of literature. The thing that surprised me was how dogmatic people were. They felt that when they read a book they loved, they saw every aspect…
-
Being Plagued
In a quest for meaning, NPR compares the Ebola epidemic to Albert Camus’s The Plague. The Plague doesn’t have a happy ending, of course, though it’s not quite as hopeless as you might think. Initially, Dr. Rieux is a little resigned…
-
The Syphilis Code
A deep meditation on whatever it was that plagued James Joyce. For some, the uncertainty surrounding Joyce’s condition has turned the issue into his most captivating puzzle. Erik Schneider, an independent scholar, became particularly fascinated. Schneider had dropped out of the…
-
Weekly Geekery
THIS. THIIIISSSSS. And this history of “This.” Can Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) save the crumbling ivory towers of higher education? “Tech companies, in their many guises, always tell stories about the future of the world.” Kids these days are…
-
Monkeys Don’t Have Stories
The question, “why fiction?” has very much been on my mind lately, and it’s one of these things that, again, is so big, and so obvious that most people just don’t think about it. It seems obvious to people that…
-
So, You Want to Be a Great Writer?
Well, then. If you want to be a great writer, here is what you have to do. Some walked to get away from work, to clear the mind of words and embrace direct experience; others, to ruminate on their scribbled…
-
Weekly Geekery
Examining the troubled origins of our search for technological utopia. Autocorrect is our favorite fall guy for texting errors, but it’s also the reason you can text. What is worth saving from your digital legacy? Don’t resist, just welcome our…
-
You Have a Problem
Did you know that owning 1,000 books or more means you have a problem? We’re all in trouble. Rachel Kramer Brussel explains at The Toast: Books were far and away the most challenging possessions for me to part with. Unopened Talk magazines,…
-
The Brontes Get Failing Marks
It’s no surprise from how the Bronte sisters wrote about school in their novels that their school reports would be less than exemplary. Still, to read Charlotte Bronte’s school report that describes her as an indifferent writer who knows little…