Author Archives: Robert Basil
Vocativ: News from the deep web
Another new top-of-the-morning visit these days is Vocativ. It’s a news site that reports on stories I often haven’t seen elsewhere. What sets is apart from traditional online reportage is how it finds stories. From the website: Vocativ is at … Continue reading
Aeon: Intellectual Culture
My new favourite place to go very morning is Aeon, a marvellous multimedia site devoted to intellectual culture: “big ideas, serious enquiry, a humane worldview and good writing.” From the About page: Aeon has four channels…. Most weekdays, it publishes … Continue reading
News Literacy 2016
While we’re talking about Jay Rosen, let me introduce you to an initiative he started the other day with some of his graduate students at NYU: NewsLiteracy2016. This is a wonderful project. Jay’s announcement on his Facebook feed: One of … Continue reading
Self-revision
It is hard to edit one’s own work into its final version; you always need a second pair of eyes. One can, though, review and recast one’s work using intelligent techniques. My former mentor NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen mentions two … Continue reading
Puzzling Advertising: Who is the intended audience?
This advertisement by Vanda Pharmaceuticals (shown a dozen times a day, it seems, on MSNBC) is for a drug called Hetlioz. (It’s very expensive.) Vanda says Hetlioz helps blind people who have a rare condition called Non-24. These folk have trouble sleeping through the night and staying … Continue reading
Practice
As a teacher and as an editor, my counsel to students and writers often seems too obvious even to say. For instance: “You can’t complete a large project in a short time. Proceed bit by bit” (or “bird by bird“). … Continue reading
Smart/Dumb
In my profession some colleagues believe that marking hard – giving more D’s than B’s, for instance – correlates with a high level of “rigour” in teaching. To my mind, though, there is often no connection between grade distribution and … Continue reading
L’Esprit D’Escalier
Things have changed, if just a little bit, in ten years. From January 2005: I’ve been hearing dialogue everywhere, dialogue that seems to be coming from the same play. At the end of party I went to recently, a woman told … Continue reading
So, you think you can’t write …
Dana Fontein, a fine blog writer over at Hootsuite, posted a really helpful piece this morning, “So You Think You Can’t Write: 8 Writing Resources for Non-Writers.” Many believe that they simply cannot write, or that they aren’t a “writer,” when … Continue reading
Mental Hygiene
In a post called “Cognitive” my good friend Jonathan Mayhew explores one of NoContest’s recurrent themes: There is the idea that you can prevent decay in cognitive function by doing inane, mindless games on the computer, such as those peddled … Continue reading
