* In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males Artifact: Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dates: 1980-present I escaped high school and the American South the summer after I graduated. I arrived in Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus, educated in comic books, Tolkein and Frank Herbert, album-oriented rock music, the Ten Best Reasons to Escape the [...]

Of Jocks and Fags Dates: 1976-80 (-present) Picture a boy growing up in the same home from birth to the end of Junior High at age 15. The friends he made in first grade remain his friends, and his world, for the next nine years. He is blissfully secure in this world, in which nothing [...]

Reading Despite Teaching or, How the hulk led me to Hamlet Artifact: 1976 Killraven Comic Book (final issue) Date: 1969-1980 Cultural Element: Education: Standardized Curriculum; Aesthetics of Class: ‘High’ v. ‘Pop’ Culture Commentary: I was born to a middle class family of Tennessee and Alabama origins, and raised in a house with few books (okay, [...]

Gloucester: O! let me kiss that hand! Lear: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality. –Shakespeare, King Lear, IV.vi.131-2 I don’t mean to get morbid here, it being summer and all, but I’ve been spending a good bit of time lately in the Intensive Care Unit with my mother-in-law, and the sights there [...]

Alrighty, Mr. Meyer – you’ve won me.  What you’re doing with video is worth it for everybody to watch.  I’m enjoying your questions and explorations, and you’re certainly upping the game. This one’s my favorite so far: dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo. I’m hoping to be ready to [...]

After watching the following video on Dean Shareski’s blog (thanks to Kate Tabor for the alert): Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo. –and then watching this immensely disturbing clip from the Uncounted documentary about election theft in the 2004 USA elections: –and in the 2006 elections: –it should be no wonder that I [...]

danah boyd just posted a “request for brain-fodder” from her readers, and I played along by posting the below (or trying to – maybe it’s being moderated, maybe it was spammed, maybe some cyber-Cerberus ate it on the banks of the thread).  It’s a question I’ve been turning over for a while now, and enough [...]

1. Pew News IQ Quiz: America’s college graduates score a D- (61%) on basic news knowledge. (click for larger image) Take the Pew quiz here. It’s only 12 questions.  It raises a few questions, among which these interest me most: a)  I haven’t lived in the States since ’98, and haven’t consumed any mainstream US [...]

“I want to stress that this book is not, and never was, intended to replace any textbooks of history that may serve a very different purpose at school. I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take notes or to memorise names and dates. In fact, I promise [...]

I always tell people who tell me that I’m going to hell for being decidedly skeptical about myths from pre-scientific times that a) I’ve read the Bible in its entirety three times, and studied world religions and Church history enough to feel 99% certain the myths are simply myths (and that 1% of doubt is [...]