“The Oxford English Dictionary defines clickbait thusly: ‘(On the Internet) content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.’ More colloquially, Josh Benton of Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab defined clickbait on Twitter (on the Internet) as ‘noun: things I don’t like on the Internet’.”
Month: November 2014
Would Science Exist Without Religion?
Most popular ideas about science and progress – and many scientists – ignore or gloss over the extent to which religious thought was crucial to the founding breakthroughs of modern science.
Annals Of Public Art: Whose Idea Was This Memorial To Nelson Mandela?
Cape Town artist Michael Elion, commissioned to create a sculpture to honor Mandela for the city’s waterfront, came up with a giant pair of Ray-Bans. (At least they’re facing toward Robben Island, where he spent 18 years in prison.)
He Really Was Funny Once (Adam Gopnik On Bob Hope)
“When I was a teen-ager, I sort of hated Bob Hope. All of us did. … There he was, year after year, on those post-Christmas U.S.O. specials, with shrieking starlets and shirtless soldiers, swinging his golf club like a swagger stick. … America, however, is the country of the eternal appeals court, where judgment, once it has worked its way through the system, has to work its way through it all over again.”
Surprise Winner Of Canada’s $100K Giller Prize
Montreal music blogger Sean Michaels took the award for his debut novel, Us Conductors, a thoroughly fictionalized account of the life of Leon Theremin, inventor of you-know-what.
The Songwriters Of “Frozen” Have A New Musical On The Way
Up Here, by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, “will tell the story of a socially awkward computer repairman named Dan who becomes attracted to Lindsay, a t-shirt designer. But his overactive imagination keeps getting in the way of a potential relationship.”
What It Was Like To Work With Jian Ghomeshi (It Wasn’t Pretty)
“One day, Ghomeshi would be jovial and generous; the next, cold and dismissive. His chronic lateness kept staff on edge; he kept people waiting for hours. Everyone bridled – at least privately – at his mood swings and his penchant for playing staff against one another. The predominantly female staff found themselves reduced to tears by his tirades. The trauma and unhappiness within the unit was known within CBC … and yet, CBC management never intervened.”
There Is No Foolproof Way To Detect A Lie
“There are speech patterns and facial expressions said to be ‘cues,’ but these are often unreliable, and can be overcome, particularly when the liar in question doesn’t care if you believe her or not. (Wanting to be believed stresses us out, which can lead to giveaways like averted eye contact and stammering.)”
Some Wonk At The WashPost Thinks Opera is Dead Just Because The Met Doesn’t Perform Much New Work
Mind you, the source from which said wonk, at the Post‘s Wonkblog, got his data made no such claims about opera in general. But the wonk did. (Aren’t wonks supposed to know better than to make claims wildly beyond what the data supports? Isn’t that what makes them wonks?)
How The Bond Between Two Gay Men Produced Some Of World War I’s Finest Poetry
When Siegfried Sassoon met Wilfred Owen at a war hospital in Scotland.