mssv

  • A New York Times Dream

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on A New York Times Dream

    This is a real dream I had, about four hours ago: I was with a friend in a shop of gadgets and curios – the sort of place that has soap dispensers attached to D-ring clips, or electronic scales with keyboards – when I spotted a odd device on the bottom shelf. It looked like…

  • The Quick Rise of Reading

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on The Quick Rise of Reading

    A mere two weeks after I wrote about The Long Decline of Reading, which drew largely on the US National Endowment of Arts’ (NEA) 2007 data, the NEA promptly released a report (Reading on the Rise) showing that fiction reading rates significantly increased from 2002 to 2008. Not just for certain age groups or ethnicities,…

  • Mastery of Games

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    3–5 minutes

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    5 comments on Mastery of Games

    Chess is not a game I’ve ever been a big fan of. I played a little at school, but I never had the patience or concentration to really study the game or learn the moves. I’d often look at better players and have absolutely no idea what was going on or why they were making…

  • Ernst Choukula

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    2–3 minutes

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    3 comments on Ernst Choukula

    There’s been some ruckus about a History class at George Mason University in which students created a hoax about an ‘Edward Owens’, the “Last American Pirate”. They made a blog, put up some YouTube videos, and most annoyingly, created an article on Wikipedia. I find these hoaxes tiresome. We all know that it’s easy to…