Roundup

  • The sleeping schedule has gone to hell. So here goes.
  • Scott McLemee and Peniel E. Joseph discussed Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, which in turn spawned a debate here. Jump in if you feel obliged. (via A Different Stripe)
  • Liv Ullmann is taking a leading role for the first time in 38 years.
  • So if you’re a newspaper and you’re contemplating this whole “How do I make money in the digital age?” question, a new consortium with Yahoo might yield surprising results — assuming that the good folks at Editor & Publisher aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid here. A Deutsche Bank analyst suggests that this deal could generate positive revenue for newspapers. If this is true, are newspapers dead? Or are the times (and, of course, the format) a-changing?
  • When I’m not so busy, remind me to dredge up some experiential data sometime to support the fact that Garth Hallberg is not a nice man and has been known to chow down on leftover human kidneys from time to time.
  • Joe Sacco on journalism. (via FLOG)
  • To the four people who sent me the article, hoping that I’d get riled up: Nope, ain’t going to link to it. Bigger fish to fry.
  • Richard Russo’s reading recommendations create films!
  • Audible has launched its first crime serial. The series, entitled The Purloined Podcast, involves the murder of a Web 2.0 company executive by an angry listener who gets a bill for audio files he expected to download for free.
  • I haven’t yet seen Ken Burns’s The War, in part because I was extremely bothered by the jingoistic tone of this alleged “regular folks” narrative. It turns out academics had issues with the film too about the inclusive nature of Burns’s story.
  • Heaven forfend! Books are too depressing. Middle-school reading lists need to have happier books. Because 14-year-olds simply can’t handle verisimilitude. According to Mary Collins, who is actually an assistant professor of creative writing, Shirley Jackson was “lazy” for writing “The Lottery.” Never mind that this short story is a pitch-perfect example of the use of irony in fiction. Never mind that if you keep pushing the standards about what is offensive further, that it’s a zero sum game. (via The Valve, which has a more measured response to this nonsense than me)

4 Comments

  1. Eh, there’s an assistant professor or two at The Valve who doesn’t know about irony either. What gets me about Collins is that she seems never to have heard of Jackson or “The Lottery.”

  2. I haven’t yet seen Ken Burns’s The War, in part because I was extremely bothered by the jingoistic tone of this alleged “regular folks” narrative.

    Jingoistic tone? How can you say that if you haven’t watched it?
    This is a shame. I think you should watch it. If only for Daniel Inouye.

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