“So Many People, Talking, Mumbling, Murmuring, Muttering, Suggesting, … Pay Attention to Me!”
Meme Lore 101: Lecture 1 – Course Overview
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]