The video essay is not a brand new art form and it wasn’t created from scratch by YouTube’s algorithmic interest in long-form video that increases “watch time.” People have been constructing commentaries on popular culture and on “important works of art” since there was culture popular enough to be commented …
Cover of Spellbound Along with the finals for the NBA and NHL going on this weekend, there was also another kind of competition that garners far fewer onlookers: The Scrips Spelling Bee. Tonight, on network teleivision no less, a girl from my home town of Cleveland took the prize. She …
My brothers played hockey. Smelly, cold, and rough and tumble. They had early ice times and late night games. They played from mighty mites on up through peewees and then in high school too. Hockey made sense to them in a way that it never did for me. I used …
Image by Getty Images via Daylife I used to fall asleep in crazy positions. My parents tell this story about me falling asleep with my chest over my knees at the foot of the bed in Disney World. While that is basic fetal position, it is usually done on your …
We measure and rate everything. We measure how much things weigh, how many calories we consume, what rating a movie should have based upon violence, how good a meal was, how long our batteries will last, and on and on. We even measure our measurements, like how often we take …
It is the product that we are after: the book, the video, the iPhone, the worksheet, and the report. These products are the result of a huge amount of processing, working, collaborating, and creating. And yet, we are so focused on the product itself that we have almost no idea …
Action is a relative term. Is action the clicking of a button on a webpage? Is action the filling out of a form? Is action telling a friend or coworker about an idea? Is action standing outside holding up a sign, or waiting in a line? Or is action simply …