Explaining the Popularity of “Shark Week”

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…

Image of the Day: Higher Ed-Related

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…

Creeping or Striding toward The Hunger Games?

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…

Wordplay V: (Mostly) Politics Edition

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…

More on #MeToo Activism in Latin America

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The 13 July 2018 issue of University World News includes Maria Elena Hurtado’s article “Ten Universities Still Occupied in Fight to End Machismo”: The so-called ‘feminist wave’, started in mid-April, that took over by force 22 Chilean universities or faculties in demand for improved sexual harassment protocols, better conditions for female…