BY JOHN K. WILSON Today’s CBS Sunday Morning featured a segment bemoaning the loss of civility, which is apparently the great crisis of our times. It included lawyer (and law professor) Alan Dershowitz declaring, “It’s hard to have dialogue without civility.” Dershowitz has complained about being shunned in Martha’s Vineyard for his defense of Donald…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Each year, “Shark Week” marks the persistently popular, binge recycling of the films in the Jaws franchise and several dozen documentaries about how sharks mercilessly hunt seals and other prey. (As if to balance out the carnage inflicted upon the seals, in one documentary a Great White is ambushed and killed…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Huffington Post in late summer of last year, Katherine Brooks reported on the scaling back of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), a project that was begun in 1962 that has led to the publication of six volumes of distinct words and phrases from all corners of the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This past spring our contract campaign at Wright State culminated (for the time being) in the campus-wide distribution and posting of the following two fliers:
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The photo appears in a 2014 post to the site The Syrup Trap. It is accompanied by this “news report”: VANCOUVER (The News Desk) — A coyote that has been seen wandering around the campus of the University of British Columbia has suddenly found himself with more than $21,000 in…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In the “Culture Matters” section of NBC ‘s website, Daniel Arkin has contributed on article on a new game show called Paid Off, on which contestants are college graduates with significant student debt compete to answer trivia questions, with the winner having at least some of his or her debt paid…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In “Colleges Ask for a Share of Future Salary in Lieu of Loans, “ an article written for the Associated Press and published in the Washington Post, David Jordan reports that Norwich University in Montpelier, Vermont, has become the latest post-secondary institution to adopt this alternative way for students to finance…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This item is from Labour Start, which reports on labor issues and supports worker activism internationally. The details on the workers’ hours and compensation are pretty shocking: In South Korea, workers at IT software giant Oracle have been on strike since 16 May after negotiations for a first collective bargaining agreement with the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The general reaction seems to have been fairly uniform: But while some people have seemed quite jubilant at the news, other people seem to be holding a grudge.
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In this series, I have highlighted headlines that are cleverly expressed, making use of puns, irony, figurative language, or unexpected word choices to grab a reader’s attention. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has so unabashedly flouted all sorts of political conventions that headline writers have felt freer to write headlines that…