http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/02/the_mystery_of_the_millionaire_metaphysician_slate_republishes_one_of_the_greatest_magazine_stories_ever_written_.html/the-mystery-of-the-millionaire-metaphysician-slate-republishes-one-of-the-greatest-magazine-stories-ever-written-slate-magazine A Strange Philosophical Manuscript. A Secret Benefactor: The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician : http://t.co/jOiITp72 @slate classic ]]> Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:21:17 -0700 http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/02/the_mystery_of_the_millionaire_metaphysician_slate_republishes_one_of_the_greatest_magazine_stories_ever_written_.html/the-mystery-of-the-millionaire-metaphysician-slate-republishes-one-of-the-greatest-magazine-stories-ever-written-slate-magazine http://explainer.net/2011/01/george-lakoff/ As part of our research on explanatory journalism, we’re interviewing experts in fields outside journalism about their approaches to explaining complex systems to non-specialtists.

Our first expert is cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who did groundbreaking research on the embodiment of thought and language and the way people think using metaphors. For Lakoff, language is not a neutral system of communication, because it is always based on frames, conceptual metaphors, narratives, and emotions. Political thought and language is inherently moral and emotional. The basic phrases journalists use every day—words like “liberty” “freedom” “immigrant” “taxes”— are essentially contested concepts that have radically… ]]> Fri, 04 Feb 2011 03:26:37 -0700 http://explainer.net/2011/01/george-lakoff/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/all-programs-considered/?pagination=false Radio receives little critical attention. Of the various methods for communicating ideas and emotions—books, newspapers, visual art, music, film, television, the Web—radio may be the least discussed, debated, understood. This is likely because it serves largely as a transmission device, a way to take other art forms (songs, sermons) and spread them out into the world. Its other uses can be fairly pedestrian too: ball games and repetitive, if remarkably effective, right-wing commercial talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is the radio ratings champ; according to the industry’s trade journal he reaches 14.25 million listeners in an average week. Sean Hannity, working… ]]> Thu, 28 Oct 2010 03:50:00 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/all-programs-considered/?pagination=false http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2010/09/29/geoff-mcghee-data-journalism/ What bad writing has to do with war casualties and traffic over North America.

It’s no secret we have a data visualization fetish, but that’s not just because we like looking at pretty pictures; it’s because we believe the discipline is an important sensemaking mechanism for today’s data deluge, a new kind of journalism that helps frame the world and what matters in it in a visual, compelling, digestible way. Stanford’s Geoff McGhee, an online journalist specializing in multimedia and information design, tends to agree. His excellent Journalism in the Age of Data explores data visualization as… ]]> Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:19:00 -0700 http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2010/09/29/geoff-mcghee-data-journalism/ http://www.radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/ We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting. Go ahead. And this post will still be here when you return. You know you want to.
plagiarism

Caught [Digirebelle / Flickr]

Nearly every word of this essay about cultural borrowing and reworking was stolen — er, appropriated — from some other source and then cobbled together with a big dose of Lethem magic to form a cohesive whole. Even the “I”s… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:01:00 -0700 http://www.radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/ http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:00:00 -0700 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604-1,00.html Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter… ]]> Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:41:00 -0700 http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604-1,00.html