Over the last few years, much ado has been made about drone strikes in popular media. Much coverage has been positive, touting the number of terrorist militants killed in a certain confirmed strike or praising the elimination of a senior terrorist leader. There has been just as much negative press, from reports that question the […]
Have you ever thought about Genetically Modified Organisms, “Man, I wish I could totally avoid them?” Have you ever wanted to boycott a company like Coca-Cola, only to find out days, even weeks after your most recent grocery trip, that all that Honest Tea you buy goes straight to Coca-Cola’s coffers? Or have you ever […]
In recent years, creators and fans have started to mingle. Fandom was once limited to remote interactions and filtered through journalists, publicists, editors, letters, articles, book signings, film openings. Now, between ComiCon panels and Twitter, fans interact with creators immediately and loudly. More than that, past generations of fans are now themselves acting as creators; in the […]
The food we consume and the resulting benefits/hazards of specific items have been in the spotlight for quite some time now. Each week there is a new food to eat for superior health, and every other week there is another food villain to avoid. This is not surprising given the level of importance food plays […]
Big game hunting implies that a hunter is in pursuit of the most dangerous “big game” in the area. Africa’s “Big Five” are elephant, rhinoceros, Cape buffalo, lion, and leopard. American big game animals are bears, moose, and bison. Tigers and rhinos are the big game hunted on the Indian subcontinent. People seek the thrill […]
Speaking as one whose high school gym teacher once called him a “textbook private school turd,” I feel confident in reflecting on the strange, privileged, frustrating, enlightening world that is private education. As a teenager, I was lucky enough to attend classes whose enrollments usually hovered between 5 and 15 students. Above all else, this made classes […]
I’m tired of my science-minded friends’ rants about “humanity’s unhindered upward progress.” Sure, most of them will concede in a late night pseudointellectual conversation that the liberal arts all strive to reach some higher truth, and a few have separate bookshelves for their Criterion Collection DVDs, but before they finish their third Marlboro Gold of […]
One hundred and fifty years have passed since Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War. May 4, 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, an event which will be commemorated by thousands of Civil War re-enactors, visitors and dignitaries participating in the 2015 Lincoln Funeral Re-enactment. The Battle of Gettysburg, the […]
Lexical gap: “A perceived gap in the lexicon or vocabulary of a language”; ideas or “relationships that are ‘lexicalised’ or represented in the vocabulary of one language may not be in another.” —A Dictionary of Sociolinguistics The Roman orator Quintilian said that when communicating “one should aim not at being possible to understand, but […]
What is the difference between power and energy? The simple answer is that energy is the ability to do work and power is the rate at which energy is created or consumed. Both terms appear quite frequently whenever talk about electricity or environmental sustainability crops up, but are often incorrectly used interchangeably. When I pay […]
