So, for the past few years, there’s been a particular cartoon that’s made the rounds on social media which friends invariably send to me. I mean, besides being an avid reader, several members of my family are or have been librarians and are all in favor of libraries. And, let’s be honest, in this scenario, I would totally do this: some of my Viking brethren forget to pillage before they burn. Sure you may have…
For my work, I’m often focused on continuous improvement — and the silver lining of broken processes means there’s always room for improvement. On the one hand have you ever met those people for whom 99.9999% just isn’t close enough to 100%? Can more optimization be too much of a good thing? Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic feels that might be the case, starting, with that most American of statistics obsession: baseball. If you…
I was almost going to let Halloween go by without an appropriately thematic post, and then an old classmate shares something he’s narrated — and sharing is scaring!
What with the casting I’m working on for our show, Quorum, I’ve been thinking about actual secret societies, and how secret they actually are. Enter Jackie Mansky writing for Smithsonian magazine. Per the article, actual secret societies are often centered around good causes (certainly as far as the members are concerned). Not only that, but these days, they’re aren’t not too secret. Indeed, their existence is often in plain sight even if their purposes might…
Firmly in the “getting around to it” folder is this NPR article about changes with Google’s tools to take personal information out of searches from earlier this year. More later this week. Right now, I’m in the midst of a sizeable casting for Jabberwocky Audio.
I mean, if I’m going to post for the vikings yesterday, I might as well do this today:
I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole earlier this year, going through the various “experts in [X] talk about the treatment of [X] in movies.” When I saw this one, I knew it had to be this year’s Leif Erikson Day post. (Because of course I have to have a Leif Erikson post. Have you seen my name?).
In the video post from Monday, John Green briefly mentioned how one of the challenges to his book Looking for Alaska amounted to a person talked to a school official about a page in his book. The problem is, this kind of scenario happens a lot for challenging books. A single person is bringing this to the attention of a single official and there’s no process in place to review requests, challenges, or concerns. And…
You may wonder what authors think about when their books are banned, so why not frequent vlogger and author John Green who found his book, Looking for Alaska, in the crosshairs of censors. I should note this particular video is from 2016, referencing the top challenged books of 2015. There’s usually a lag time compiling the data: while it’s interesting, it’s not necessarily pressing. However, the video is also under 3 and a half minutes…
Next week is Banned Books Week, and as longtime readers may know, I always make a point of reading a banned or challenged book at this time of year. You can check out the most challenged books of 2021 or just do a bit of web searching to find historical lists and find something that might tickle your fancy in a way that scolds and censors feel your fancy should not be tickled. The books…