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Kenneth Sutton’s aide-mémoire

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Non-letter typography

April 25th, 2008 · No Comments

Wonderful post on the terminology of numeral and punctuation typography:
In “Emoticons During Wartime,” a recent article in The New Yorker (December 10, 2007), Tom McNichol documents the usefulness of emoticons in communicating by visual innuendo. Emoticons can mean whatever the writer and reader want them to mean, until, of course the meaning is explicitly defined [...]

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Making the big time?

January 23rd, 2008 · 1 Comment

Who knew the Utne site had blogs? They do, including one on spirituality, and we made it with a story I put in our Winter 2007 “Reflections” section: Suicide, Faith, and Compassion
Kate Braestrup encountered this sad reality in her work as a chaplain for game wardens, an experience she recounts in an excerpt from her [...]

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Lippmann and the News

December 15th, 2007 · No Comments

The Nation has a review of Liberty and the News by Walter Lippmann. It (the book!) was written in 1920, but it sounds like it has a lot to say for today.
“There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.”

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Watching Wikipedia

November 1st, 2007 · 1 Comment

Sometimes Andrew Sullivan links to the most amazing things: WikipediaVision (beta)

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An elitist criticises the state of criticism

September 1st, 2007 · 3 Comments

Via Arts & Letters Daily, I discovered a blog written by board members of the National Book Critics Circle. They have a guest post: Morris Dickstein on the Critical Landscape Today. I like some of the points he makes, and I too lament the falling-away of book reviews in major newspapers. I can’t help thinking [...]

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In praise of editors

July 24th, 2007 · 1 Comment

You’ll need to watch an ad to get a one-day pass if you don’t already subscribe to Salon, but this essay made my day: Let us now praise editors
I’ve also worked with writers who have reacted to my gentle suggestion that one of their precious, ungrammatical commas might perhaps be removed as if I’d insisted [...]

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Article on Quakers in Second Life

June 14th, 2007 · No Comments

My article on Quakers in Second Life has been published in the June issue of 2Life Magazine (pdf download).

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A book review to dream about

May 24th, 2007 · No Comments

As an editor who receives many unsolicited books for review, I sometimes dream of writing a book review like this one from the New York Times: An Assault on Hawaii. On Grammar Too.
On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from “Pearl Harbor.”
And you would be spectacularly wrong.

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UU Church in Second Life member interviews

March 9th, 2007 · No Comments

Longer excerpts of the interviews I conducted with members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Second Life have been published as a companion to the story I wrote. The excerpts include one interview that was cut from the edited story.

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My article on uuworld.org

February 19th, 2007 · 1 Comment

I wrote the article now featured on the uuworld.org home page: Religious reality in a virtual world.
A dragon, an angel, and a bug-eyed monster sit down in a Unitarian Universalist church. No, it’s not the beginning of a bad joke. If you’re in the popular online world of Second Life, it may just be a [...]

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