Bulletin Board
- Today is the National Day of Unplugging — although if you’re reading this, you’re not unplugged
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Stop Defending the Humanities (“This negative stereotyping [the ‘liberal intellectual’takes wing, in part, from the sense that humanities academics and the students whom they send into the professions acquire their privilege too easily, exempt from the hard scrabble of working in small business, farming, factories, supermarkets, and so on.”)
Headline of the Week
Arrest of the Week
- A Wyoming woman was charged with felony assault and battery after stabbing a human-sized teddy bear during a fight with her boyfriend, who gave her the bear
Worst Idea of the Week
- An Ohio A funeral home offered a couple a discount to keep them from going to police after an employee molested the corpse of a family member, according to a lawsuit the couple filed
Bookish Linkage
- Green Apple Books in San Francisco, my favorite bookstore, is a finalist for the Bookstore of the Year Award
- Over half of the books in British households have never been read
- A janitor at a British college stole about 100 rare books worth more than $115,000, including an original copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a book signed by Abraham Lincoln
- Bookish Lists: the shortlist for the inaugural Daphne Award (for the best books of the year — 50 years ago); the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; eight breeds of historical fiction; and nine novels based on extraordinary true stories
Nonbookish Linkage
- Eighteen things highly creative people do differently
- A inguistic analysis has produced word clouds showing the written words most unique to the the experience of using eight illicit drugs
The reason we need the humanities is because we’re human.
Adam Gopnik, “Why Teach English?”
