Search Results for art

Liberal Arts College vs. Research I University: Deathmatch

Ten principles for better academic career advisement

Jason Mittell, a media studies scholar at Middlebury College, recently wrote about his experience being a researcher at a liberal arts college. Mittell’s offering points to and comments upon a related article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kristen Ghodsee, who explained her path from UC Berkeley graduate student to Bowdoin professor. Both Ghodsee and Mittell question the assumption… read more

Finally, Smart Web 2.0 Critique

A special issue of the journal First Monday

The open-access online journal First Monday has just published a special issue devoted to critiques of Web 2.0. There have been few such attempts heretofore, the most well-known being fellow Colbert Report guest Andrew Keen’s naive and poorly-argued book The Cult of the Amateur. Thankfully, the articles in First Monday’s special issue are top-notch, and everyone should go read them,… read more

Spartans and Staplers

Selections from my Christmas morning booty

It’s Christmas morning, and I wonder how many other lucky souls can boast booty like mine. Below you’ll find a part of my under-tree take: a large, talking Leonidas action figure as depicted in the film 300 stands in front of a genuine red Swingline stapler, wrapped not in paper but in Jell-O, The Office-style. This must be what one… read more

How I Stopped Worrying About Gamers And Started Loving People Who Play Games

A response to Justin Peters' recent Slate article. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra

Every week at my company Persuasive Games we get repeated calls and emails from people interested in playing Stone City, the Cold Stone Creamery training game we created back in 2005. In the game, the player services customers at the popular mix-your-own flavor ice cream franchise by assembling the proper concoctions while allocating generally profitable portion sizes. The vast majority… read more

Where in the World was Middle Earth?

A geography professor's hypothetical geomorphology of Middle Earth

Do you read Strange Maps? You should, if you’re at all a map geek. It’s a blog about curious cartography. It’s really exactly the kind of site blogs seem to promise, regular musings on a subject so specific or arcane that another medium couldn’t support regular publication. Thanks largely to Boing Boing, there’s been a running meme lately of subway… read more

A Tool to Supercharge Your Imagination

What if The Atlantic owned a train car? I wondered. Amtrak, I had just learned on the internet, allows owners of private railcars to lash onto runs along the Northeast Corridor, among other routes. “We should have a train car,” I slacked an editor. Moments later, it appeared on my screen, bright red with our magazine’s logo emblazoned in white,… read more

How Starbucks Perfected Autumn

I drink the Pumpkin Spice Latte to commune with autumn. Not first for its taste, warmth or color, though also for those things. I order pumpkin spice to fuse my body with the leaves, the crisp air, the gentle reminders of death, and all the other trappings of fall. Twenty years ago this month, Starbucks brought this flavor to the… read more

My Books Were Used to Train Meta’s Generative AI. Good.

When The Atlantic revealed last month that tens of thousands of books published in the past 20 years had been used without permission to train Meta’s AI language model, well-known authors were outraged, calling it a “smoking gun” for mega-corporate misbehavior. Now that the magazine has put out a searchable database of affected books, the outrage is redoubled: “I would… read more

Slack Is Basically Facebook Now

“Oh,” I slacked my Atlantic colleagues earlier this week, beneath a screenshot of a pop-up note that Slack, the group-chat software we use, had presented to me moments earlier. “A fresh, more focused Slack,” it promised, or threatened. On my screen, the program’s interface was suddenly a Grimace-purple color. I sensed doom in this software update. Slowly, over the days… read more

Feeling Herd

At high noon on an early-spring day in 2017, six steers doomed to die escaped their slaughterhouse and stormed the streets of my city. The escape became a nuisance, then a scene, then a phenomenon. “Man, it was crazy!” one onlooker told the local alt-weekly. “I mean, it was fucking bulls running through the city of St. Louis!” What seemed… read more