betajames

"1984" by George Orwell:

 

At first I did like the book. Then it just started to suck right around the time when Winston was getting sexually involved with his girl friend. I hated the book so much that I forgot her name. The first hundred or so pages i liked, then it just got really boring. So II highly reccomend that you DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. And please for the love of God don't read that "Brave New World" book by Hoxley. It is twice as worse as 1984. To put it bluntly, DON'T READ ANY GEORGE ORWELL. Your just waisting your time.

Some professional athletes, however, have developed an unhealthy passion for video games. For example, Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards, an avid video gamer, became so obsessed about winning at Halo that he played games with a fake teammate to drive up his experience points. And Joel Zumaya, a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, was unable to pitch in 2006 after suffering forearm and wrist inflammation in his arm from playing too much Guitar Hero.

More and more books are being printed with soy-based inks, rather than petroleum-based ones, on paper that is recycled or sourced from well-managed forests and that was produced at pulp mills that don’t use poisons like chlorine to whiten it. The electronics industry, too, is trying to reduce the use of toxic chemicals, and to improve working conditions and worker safety throughout its far-flung supply chains.

So, how many volumes do you need to read on your e-reader to break even?

With respect to fossil fuels, water use and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it’s 100 books; with human health consequences, it’s somewhere in between.

Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.

The hope of nonfiction is to connect readers to something outside the book: the past, a discovery, a social issue. To do this, authors need to draw on pre-existing words and images.

Getting to the root of people’s fascination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Gottschall said, is like “mapping wonderland.”

Literature, like other fields including history and political science, has looked to the technology of brain imaging and the principles of evolution to provide empirical evidence for unprovable theories.

Adding to the quandary in which university presses find themselves while navigating the storms of the digital transition (elevated to a near-perfect storm by the simultaneous recession) is that few of them have pools of available capital to fund required new investments in digital publishing platforms and cyberinfrastructure or to replace falling print revenues even temporarily while awaiting the predicted, but uncertain revenues deriving from sales of digital versions of texts. Faced with the collapse of their traditional business model, the decline of university subventions, and the increasing unwillingness and inability of universities to tolerate press debt, the problem for many university presses is not just how to manage the digital transition, but how to survive it.

The rising popularity of uncontrolled peer-to-peer networking is having an effect on the classic role of peer review for research validation, one of the core functions of academic publishing. But if some researchers may be worried by the potential loss of rigor in the assessment process, others see it as liberating.

Really, the whole pledge is just one big hapax legomenon, a string of syllables that only comes to life in classrooms and school assemblies. But there's a lesson for children in that: The attachment to flag and country is a unique bond that requires a special language of its own. In theory, the pledge could do most of the same work if we had children say it in Anglo-Saxon or Arapaho, or if we replaced it with the lyrics to "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah." They're going to turn the words into jabberwocky anyway: "I led a pigeon to the flag," "one Asian under guard."

A way of coming to a more integrated understanding of emotion is to surrender to the boundless accessibility of laughing and crying. I spent the last year occupied with such a task. The search for answers led me to areas as new to science as the mirror-neuron system, as painful as neurological disorders, and as artistic as method acting. There emerged a uniquely human science of emotion that begins to sew closed the doggedly dualistic notions of mind and body, heart and head. 

For years, these narratives were passed down from older sibling to younger sibling and kept alive through iconic events embedded in the monoculture as well as smaller moments trafficked through the bootleg circuit run by ardent fans of the music. But, with the dawn of YouTube, these narratives started being perpetuated by the instant, free accessibility of archival footage. This is content that, until YouTube came along, had no real place in media besides the occasional kitschy or overly reverent clip show. In the past, if you wanted to experience that iconic moment in which Dylan muttered "play it fuckin' loud" in response to the man who cried "Judas," you had to track down a bootleg. Now, all you have to do is fire up your browser: