- *Clive Thompson on the death of the phone call
- *Pew on how Americans get their news now
- *“Artists Find Backers as Labels Wane,” on the shifts in the structure of the music industry (counterpoint: “The Web’s Elusive Promise of a DIY Career in the Arts”)
- *“Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age”
- *the new literacy, which we’ll read next week
- *“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (and relatedly), which we’ll also read next week
- *“The infertility timebomb: Are men facing rapid extinction?”
- *100 years of style in 100 seconds
- *“Ancient Aliens, Scientism, and the Need for Myth,” on the rise of the “paranormal edutainment complex”
- *“The Rise of the NBA Nerd”
- *“From Hogwarts to Harvard: Survival Games for the 21st Century”
- *three things we looked at on drones: how robot drones revolutionized the face of warfare, “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man”, and the “Living Under Drones” report
- *“Brain Gain,” on the rise of neuroenhancing drugs
Lastly, here’s one more example from PSU English’s own Jessica O’Hara, who has posted a link to an essay she wrote for an edited volume on the philosophy of horror. The essay is entitled “Making Their Presence Known: TV’s Ghost-Hunter Phenomenon in a ‘Post-‘ World,” and you can find it on Google Books here. She calls particular attention to the “Spectres of 9/11” section, near the end of the essay, as an example of paradigm shift argumentation. Here’s Jessica talking about the development of the essay:
When I developed this essay, at first, all I knew was that I wanted to write on ghost-hunter shows because I liked them and the Paranormal State people were local. The section about 9/11 came out of my realization that the structure of ghost-hunter shows mimicked HGTV home-improvement shows. Once I made that connection, which amused me, I started to wonder why both genres of shows appeared this past decade. Then I connected their rise to the rhetoric of home improvement, which imagines the home as a “sanctuary.” Why does the home need to be a sanctuary? I thought about this question in relation to 9/11, the emergent dread of public spaces, and the decline in organized religion.
