Henlo class, and welcome to your introductory course on the dankest Internet trend since coolmath-games.com and Early Youtube. I’m sure that many of you have elected to take this course because of your confounding daily encounters with spicy fresh-baked memes. You’ve caught yourself thinking “what are these ‘may-mays’ my children are always talking about? Why […]
Internet Trolls Have a Case of the Mondays
A doozie of an article from the WSJ last week, provocatively titled, “We’re All Internet Trolls (Sometimes).” The piece highlights recent research out of Stanford and Cornell on the patterns and habits of internet trolling. Like any study of taboo topics, the research has its own missing pieces, but some of the findings are, frankly, revealing: […]
Another Week Ends: Cognitive Dissonance, Internet Addiction, Middle-Aged Mortals, and Unanswered Prayers
Update: Accompanying episode of The Mockingcast up on iTunes now! ONE. On Monday, Mallory Ortberg, founder of The Toast (the-toast.net), posted a video in which she discusses her experience founding a blog. It’s safe to say that we’ve become fans of The Toast here at Mockingbird, and Ortberg’s language in this video, and her transparency, […]
The Internet and the Ache in Franzen's Purity
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Purity, came out last week, and although it temporarily cost me some good moods and positive self-regard, I got through it. Franzen has a real knack for exposing the ugly personal implications behind most of my daily behaviors. He has a low anthropology, which is partially why his writing is so […]
Another Week Ends: More PC, Orthorexia, Perfect Ripostes, Grace in Addiction in Asheville, SBTB Redivivus, and Implausible Pop-Country Songs
1. One subject that’s been on our minds lately is political correctness, the orthodoxy of speech by which the progressives are divided from the bigots. It’s a division almost as absolute as that between righteous and sinners, and the press and universities – places supposed to be bastions of the liberal ideal of open speech – have […]
What Do Dave Eggers, Dirty Toes and Shampoo Have in Common?
If God was interested in being clean, I wonder if he might have stalled the incarnation a millennium or two until the days of close-toed shoes or indoor plumbing. He would then have had the fortune of choosing from fifty different kinds of shampoo at Kroger, or the experience of a soothing pedicure to rinse […]
Browser Histories and Manic Mental Ticker Tape
An amazing little post appeared on The New Yorker culture pages a couple of days ago, Andrea Denhoed’s “A Fake Facebook Wedding.” She kicks off with a description of an ingenious if enraging prank before going on to ponder what our browser histories have to say about us–not always the most comfortable of subjects. Browser […]
Is Google Searching Me?
After reading this very short clip from Nicholas Carr over at NPR’s Marketplace, I immediately had to order his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. For now, I’ll suffice it to say this won’t be the only post on Carr; he’s a terrific writer of science and the brain and […]