Aug. 9th, 2012
Faking Criminal Insanity
Aug. 9th, 2012 03:00 amWhen someone commits a horrific, inexplicable crime, we naturally wonder whether he’s mentally ill: Who but a crazy person could do such a thing? But when a killer acts crazy after his arrest, we also might wonder whether he’s preparing for his trial. That’s the speculation around Colorado shooter James Holmes, whose psychiatric treatment and bizarre behavior in court and prison make people wonder whether he’s truly insane or building a case for an insanity defense. It leads to the question: Can a criminal get away with faking insanity?
-- Douglas Starr at Slate.com
Personally, I find the challenge to be in faking sanity, and apparently I am not always very successful at that.
-- Douglas Starr at Slate.com
Personally, I find the challenge to be in faking sanity, and apparently I am not always very successful at that.
Faking Criminal Insanity
Aug. 9th, 2012 03:00 amWhen someone commits a horrific, inexplicable crime, we naturally wonder whether he’s mentally ill: Who but a crazy person could do such a thing? But when a killer acts crazy after his arrest, we also might wonder whether he’s preparing for his trial. That’s the speculation around Colorado shooter James Holmes, whose psychiatric treatment and bizarre behavior in court and prison make people wonder whether he’s truly insane or building a case for an insanity defense. It leads to the question: Can a criminal get away with faking insanity?
-- Douglas Starr at Slate.com
Personally, I find the challenge to be in faking sanity, and apparently I am not always very successful at that.
-- Douglas Starr at Slate.com
Personally, I find the challenge to be in faking sanity, and apparently I am not always very successful at that.
Women Writers
Aug. 9th, 2012 06:00 am“If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition.”
-- Emily Gould
Heh, yes, it's funny how that works.
-- Emily Gould
Heh, yes, it's funny how that works.
Women Writers
Aug. 9th, 2012 06:00 am“If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition.”
-- Emily Gould
Heh, yes, it's funny how that works.
-- Emily Gould
Heh, yes, it's funny how that works.
Excessive Punctuation??
Aug. 9th, 2012 12:00 pmAnybody who has ever logged on knows that online writing begets exclamation points. A lot of exclamation points!
-- Ben Yagoda at The New York Times
Is that true? For myself, even before I heard of the Internet, I always liked using what punctuation marks I could get my hands on and using them freely and exuberantly and without apology. What's the point of getting the big box of 64 crayons if you are not going to use all the colors?
In any case, we are given a fancy theory for this supposed punctuation craze:
David Shipley, the executive editor of Bloomberg View and a former Op-Ed editor at this newspaper, and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate that the trend stems in part from the nature of online media. “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be,” they write. But what if a particular point needs to be stressed beyond where it would normally be? Well, you need to kick it up an additional notch, with another exclamation point, or three. The unsurprising result has been Weimar-level exclamation inflation, where (it sometimes seems) you have to raise your voice to a scream merely to be heard, and a sentence without blingy punctuation comes across like a whisper.
And sometimes one just wants to have fun, with the challenge being not to sacrifice clarity for your grammatical zeal. If this has shown up more in Internet use, it may be because people felt like they were not bound by their English teachers and bosses when zipping off fun e-messages to friends and co-workers, and one could feel like a teenager again - wild and crazy with no thought for the morrow.
-- Ben Yagoda at The New York Times
Is that true? For myself, even before I heard of the Internet, I always liked using what punctuation marks I could get my hands on and using them freely and exuberantly and without apology. What's the point of getting the big box of 64 crayons if you are not going to use all the colors?
In any case, we are given a fancy theory for this supposed punctuation craze:
David Shipley, the executive editor of Bloomberg View and a former Op-Ed editor at this newspaper, and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate that the trend stems in part from the nature of online media. “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be,” they write. But what if a particular point needs to be stressed beyond where it would normally be? Well, you need to kick it up an additional notch, with another exclamation point, or three. The unsurprising result has been Weimar-level exclamation inflation, where (it sometimes seems) you have to raise your voice to a scream merely to be heard, and a sentence without blingy punctuation comes across like a whisper.
And sometimes one just wants to have fun, with the challenge being not to sacrifice clarity for your grammatical zeal. If this has shown up more in Internet use, it may be because people felt like they were not bound by their English teachers and bosses when zipping off fun e-messages to friends and co-workers, and one could feel like a teenager again - wild and crazy with no thought for the morrow.
Excessive Punctuation??
Aug. 9th, 2012 12:00 pmAnybody who has ever logged on knows that online writing begets exclamation points. A lot of exclamation points!
-- Ben Yagoda at The New York Times
Is that true? For myself, even before I heard of the Internet, I always liked using what punctuation marks I could get my hands on and using them freely and exuberantly and without apology. What's the point of getting the big box of 64 crayons if you are not going to use all the colors?
In any case, we are given a fancy theory for this supposed punctuation craze:
David Shipley, the executive editor of Bloomberg View and a former Op-Ed editor at this newspaper, and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate that the trend stems in part from the nature of online media. “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be,” they write. But what if a particular point needs to be stressed beyond where it would normally be? Well, you need to kick it up an additional notch, with another exclamation point, or three. The unsurprising result has been Weimar-level exclamation inflation, where (it sometimes seems) you have to raise your voice to a scream merely to be heard, and a sentence without blingy punctuation comes across like a whisper.
And sometimes one just wants to have fun, with the challenge being not to sacrifice clarity for your grammatical zeal. If this has shown up more in Internet use, it may be because people felt like they were not bound by their English teachers and bosses when zipping off fun e-messages to friends and co-workers, and one could feel like a teenager again - wild and crazy with no thought for the morrow.
-- Ben Yagoda at The New York Times
Is that true? For myself, even before I heard of the Internet, I always liked using what punctuation marks I could get my hands on and using them freely and exuberantly and without apology. What's the point of getting the big box of 64 crayons if you are not going to use all the colors?
In any case, we are given a fancy theory for this supposed punctuation craze:
David Shipley, the executive editor of Bloomberg View and a former Op-Ed editor at this newspaper, and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate that the trend stems in part from the nature of online media. “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be,” they write. But what if a particular point needs to be stressed beyond where it would normally be? Well, you need to kick it up an additional notch, with another exclamation point, or three. The unsurprising result has been Weimar-level exclamation inflation, where (it sometimes seems) you have to raise your voice to a scream merely to be heard, and a sentence without blingy punctuation comes across like a whisper.
And sometimes one just wants to have fun, with the challenge being not to sacrifice clarity for your grammatical zeal. If this has shown up more in Internet use, it may be because people felt like they were not bound by their English teachers and bosses when zipping off fun e-messages to friends and co-workers, and one could feel like a teenager again - wild and crazy with no thought for the morrow.
Serena Williams and the Crip Dance
Aug. 9th, 2012 06:00 pmSerena Williams takes the gold in her tennis match, but in the end, we get another story that questions the Americanness of a black Olympian's values, as she breaks out with the crip dance:
"For the uninitiated, the Crip Walk is a funky little hip-hop dance move made famous by Crip gang members in Compton in the 1970s," wrote Fox Sports' Reid Forgrave, who went on to criticize Williams:
And there was Serena — the tennis legend, the winner of 14 individual Grand Slams, the best player of her generation, the American girl being crowned at the All-England Club as the queen of tennis — Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world.
I had never heard of the thing before now. If this gif is the dance, I must say that it does look like a catchy number.

"For the uninitiated, the Crip Walk is a funky little hip-hop dance move made famous by Crip gang members in Compton in the 1970s," wrote Fox Sports' Reid Forgrave, who went on to criticize Williams:
And there was Serena — the tennis legend, the winner of 14 individual Grand Slams, the best player of her generation, the American girl being crowned at the All-England Club as the queen of tennis — Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world.
I had never heard of the thing before now. If this gif is the dance, I must say that it does look like a catchy number.

Serena Williams and the Crip Dance
Aug. 9th, 2012 06:00 pmSerena Williams takes the gold in her tennis match, but in the end, we get another story that questions the Americanness of a black Olympian's values, as she breaks out with the crip dance:
"For the uninitiated, the Crip Walk is a funky little hip-hop dance move made famous by Crip gang members in Compton in the 1970s," wrote Fox Sports' Reid Forgrave, who went on to criticize Williams:
And there was Serena — the tennis legend, the winner of 14 individual Grand Slams, the best player of her generation, the American girl being crowned at the All-England Club as the queen of tennis — Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world.
I had never heard of the thing before now. If this gif is the dance, I must say that it does look like a catchy number.

"For the uninitiated, the Crip Walk is a funky little hip-hop dance move made famous by Crip gang members in Compton in the 1970s," wrote Fox Sports' Reid Forgrave, who went on to criticize Williams:
And there was Serena — the tennis legend, the winner of 14 individual Grand Slams, the best player of her generation, the American girl being crowned at the All-England Club as the queen of tennis — Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world.
I had never heard of the thing before now. If this gif is the dance, I must say that it does look like a catchy number.
