“By providing students an inadequate history education, [sociologist and historian James W.] Loewen argues, America’s schools breed adults who tend to conflate empirical fact and opinion, and who lack the media literacy necessary to navigate conflicting information.” A Q&A between Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, and Atlantic writer Alia Wong.
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Smithsonian Asks: What’s The Role Of Art Today?
In a series of conversations and essays, the Smithsonian explores how art interacts with the contemporary world and how its role is evolving.
Has This Scholar Figured Out How To Perform Ancient Greek Music?
Despite the wealth of information we have about ancient Greek musical theory, actually transcribing the musical notation that has survived, let alone working out practical performance issues, has been a problem unsolved for centuries. Oxford classicist Armand D’Angour writes about the recent advances and discoveries that have led to his five-years-long-and-counting project to find, transcribe, and perform the surviving repertoire of ancient Hellenic song.
Screen-Based Learning Is A Poor Substitute For Real Experience – We Need To Rethink Learning
Many adults appreciate the power of computers and the internet, and think that children should have access to them as soon as possible. Yet screen learning displaces other, more tactile ways to discover the world. Human beings learn with their eyes, yes, but also their ears, nose, mouth, skin, heart, hands, feet. The more time kids spend on computers, the less time they have to go on field trips, build model airplanes, have recess, hold a book in their hands, or talk with teachers and friends.
The Lost Yiddish Songs Of World War II
Many of these lyrics – unperformed since 1947 and rediscovered six decades later in the National Library of Ukraine – “seethe with resentment but emphasize triumph. ‘Victory Song,’ recorded in 1947, encourages listeners to drink heartily and rejoice; soon ‘those German murderers will be out of our lives forever.’ Others mock their invaders, scoffing at their incompetence. … Some songs are plainly heartbreaking.”
An Arms Race For Truth: The Increasingly Sophisticated Efforts To Scam Journalists
The problem for newsrooms is threefold: how to identify sophisticated manipulations, how to educate audiences without inducing apathy and deepening mistrust, and how to keep the growth of this technology from casting doubt on legitimate and truthful stories.
‘Etymythologies’ – Bogus Memes About The Origins Of Words, And How They Get Around
Last month, for instance, it started going around the web that “tag” (as in the game) was an acronym for “touch and go.” (Merriam-Webster was not amused.) “Etymythology [was] coined by the Yale linguist Laurence Horn for the general phenomenon of using fabricated etymologies (acronymic or otherwise) in the service of telling attractive origin stories, doing for words what Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories did for animals.”
Why We Still Revere French As A Language
Having survived decade after decade of the America-dominated post–World War II global order, French may indeed look a bit worse for wear, cluttered with sometimes risible English loanwords and dismissed as useless by the increasingly many students who pass it up in favor of Spanish and Mandarin. Yet however many now regard the French language as little more than a fussy antiquarian hobby, as many others continue to revere it.
‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Author Turned Down Buckets Of Money – Twice – To Get The Movie Version He Wanted Made
Kevin Kwan’s satirical rom-com novel sold over a million copies in more than 20 languages, and the studios promptly came calling. First, he sold the rights for $1, in exchange for the right to keep some control over the development process and keep Hollywood from whitewashing the Asians out of it. Then Netflix offered an eight-figure package that included complete artistic control for Kwan and director Jon Chu. They turned it down in favor of Warner Bros., just for the chance to get an all-Asian cast on the big screen in a major Hollywood production.
Betty Miles, Who Wrote Children’s Lit With A Social Conscience, Dead At 90
“[Her] books for children and young adults addressed real-life issues like sexism, racism and censorship after she had emerged from the 1950s to become a feminist.”