If you pay attention to my music entries, you may have noticed a recurrent theme. It seems a lot of the bands I hear these days, many of which I really like, remind me of bands from the past. Like The Mary Onettes: I recently tripped across one such example, Sweden’s The Mary Onettes. They can’t seem to make up
Read moreWhen we created the new WordsDay graphic above a few weeks back we challenged everybody to name all the authors. Some of you took a shot, and I think the best set of guesses got about 10 of 15 right. So, for those of you who have been dying of curiosity, here are the answers. Left to right: William Butler
Read moreDon Tapscott has some radical new ideas about education. Here’s a sampling (as related by ReadWriteWeb): “…the age of learning through the memorization of facts and figures is coming to an end. Instead, students should be taught to think creatively and better understand the knowledge that’s available online.” “…Google, Wikipedia, and other online libraries means that rote memorization is no
Read moreIt has been alleged that Scholars & Rogues is not, strictly speaking, a political blog. Sure, we write about overtly political issues and devote our share of time to things like media policy, energy and the environment, business and the economy, and international dynamics. Yes, we were credentialed to cover the DNC, but we don’t really do hard, insider, by
Read moreIn case you missed it, Colbert had an unusually literary moment the other night. The festivities commence at the 1:41 mark. This post is dedicated to all Scrogues who did their MA theses on Austen. *cough* Booth *cough*
Read moreWe have a new WordsDay graphic because somebody *cough* Mackowski *cough* insisted that we needed one. So here it is. Now, a little fun. The first S&R reader to accurately identify the 15 authors shown, in order from left to right, wins … well, our enduring admiration. It ain’t much, but what do you want for nothing? Submit your answers
Read more“I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.” “Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.””Were they an inspiration?” She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding
Read moreA couple weeks I go I offered up part one in a series on poetry vs. lyrics, noting from firsthand experience the differences between the two. In brief, I’ve always felt like it was wrong to call rock stars poets – even if their words are fantastic, as they often are, the very nature of bending words to suit a
Read moreReach out and touch me now Aphrodite said You aren’t the only one with armies in your head We’re fond of calling our great rock stars poets. Dylan is a poet. Springsteen is a poet. John Lennon was a poet. Jim Morrison (*gag*) was a poet. And so on. Certainly the first three (have) produced some marvelous words, but as
Read morePerhaps I’m jaded. Maybe I’ve read “A Rose for Emily” once too often, researched a tad too much about dismemberments in Memphis, taught one class too many on “A Good Man is Hard to Find,†and indulged myself too uncritically in the fictive Carolina childhood of T.R. Pearson. Maybe there’s something deep and dark and twisted in me. I don’t
Read moreIt’s a totally new literary genre! Well, sorta. You may have noticed that mobile is getting to be a really big deal, and you may have noticed that Them Danged Kids® are texting until their thumbs fall off. You probably didn’t realize, though, the magnitude of mobile and the SMS phenomenon. There are now over 3 billion mobile phones in
Read moreFinal part in a series. How appropriate that a publication whose launch was dominated by photography of the technological wonder of the day should end its run with an equally impressive tribute to mankind’s latest technological accomplishment. As noted earlier, LIFE’s final issue was released a scant three weeks after Apollo 17, NASA’s last trip to the moon, and in
Read moreI used to work with a HAL 9000. Back when I was at US West in the late ’90s we had a voice system into which we would record the day’s company news so that employees without Internet access could dial in and keep up with the latest events. As with any such system there was a dial-in sequence, buttons
Read morePart four in a series. The terrible specter of nuclear annihilation was now clear in the American mind, a condition that LIFE acknowledged and addressed. But in the months that followed V-J Day an odd thing happened, as military testing of the new weaponry provided an opportunity for bomb-watchers to indulge their awe without having to confront the frightful context
Read morePart three in a series. In an age and a culture dominated by scientism, the word “sample†tends to invoke the adjectival “representative,†and I cannot begin to imagine culling a meaningful representative sample from LIFE’s 400-plus issues. Still, it seems important to devote a few pages to what happened with LIFE and technology between the Fort Peck Dam and
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lullaby pit 