At the beginning of each semester I tell my students the very thing that journalist Zat Rana gets at in a recent article for Quartz when I deliver a mini-sermon about my complete ban on phones — and also, for almost all purposes, laptops — in my classroom. A smartphone or almost any cell phone…
Tag: facebook
Teeming Links – July 4, 2014
If current world events have you wondering — or especially if they don’t have you wondering — about the possibility of a bona fide new world war, please bear this in mind: a hundred years ago World War One was impossible — until it was inevitable. So, is anybody really surprised that Facebook was (is?)…
Teeming Links – June 27, 2014
Beware the man who has more influence on the future of reading than anybody else in the world: Jeff Bezos is simultaneously a visionary, an innovator, and a destroyer. Pro Publica explains why online tracking is getting creepier. (Hint: It has to do with the merging of all the mountains of online and offline data…
Teeming Links – April 11, 2014
Apparently, the whole of West Virginia has now become a sacrifice zone for the coal industry. Did you know there’s an average of one train derailment every single day in America? This is why the oil transport industry is basically a giant, horrible, environmentally apocalyptic accident just waiting to happen. You know all that propaganda…
Teeming Links – July 9, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net The presiding reflection for today’s offering of recommended and necessary reading and viewing comes from British novelist and essayist Tim Parks, who elicits an important truth about the silence that so many of us seek, or say we think we seek, amid a culture of clamor: Arguably, when…
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Mexican Cartels Dispatch Trusted Agents to Live Deep Inside United States The Washington Post (Associated Press), April 1, 2013 Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe…
Recommended Reading 36
This week: How entire U.S. towns now rely on food stamps. The regrets of the Iraqi “sledgehammer man,” whose image became famous in Western media when Saddam’s statue fell. The Obama administration’s epic (and hypocritical) focus on secrecy. The demise of Google Reader and what it portends for Net-i-fied life and culture. The sinister rise…
Recommended Reading 34
The Teeming Brain’s “Recommended Reading” series has been on hiatus since last November. And now it’s back, with a slightly altered/streamlined format (read: no graphics, just links and text) that’s more sustainable in the context of your trusty editor’s various other claims on time, energy, and attention. * * * Madrid: Dignity and Indignation Aaron…
Shame for Fame: The New Path to Stardom in the Age of the Status Cult
The Extinction Papers – Chapter Two I am routinely wrong about many things. The enduring popularity of televised talent shows. The assured success of former Raider Bill Callahan as the new head coach of my 2004 Nebraska Cornhuskers. The viability of something called Twitter. While the second one caused me more pain (barely edged…
Facebook, ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ and the crossing of a cultural threshold
One of the most subtle and subversive pieces of social criticism in Fahrenheit 451comes early in the book when Montag, a fireman (i.e., book burner) who eventually wakes up to a recognition of his society’s essential character as a fascist-totalitarian dark age, chats with a teenaged girl named Clarisse. Or rather, it’s she who chats…