Florida Quakers give away hundreds of Black-history books
Continue reading Quaker Book Giveaway: Turning the Page on Florida Censorship
Quaker Book Giveaway: Turning the Page on Florida Censorship
Category Archives: writing & Such
Chatbot fantasies
Spend enough time with ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots and it doesn’t take long for them to spout falsehoods.
Described as hallucination, confabulation or just plain making things up, it’s now a problem for every business, organization and high school student trying to get a generative AI system to compose documents and get work done. Some are using it on tasks with the potential for high–stakes consequences, from psychotherapy to researching and writing legal briefs.
Dog Days Diversions — Nursery Rhymes: A Scholarly Sampler
Washington Post — archive
Humpty Dumpty. Jack Horner. Miss Muffet. You knew them as a child, and if you have youngsters of your own, chances are they know them, too. Mother Goose and her nursery rhymes are old friends. Seems as if they’ve been around forever, and with the tenacity of Golden Oldies, they’ll stick with you for life.Like many nursery rhymes, they are centuries old.
Continue reading Dog Days Diversions — Nursery Rhymes: A Scholarly Sampler
Maybe The Best Column I Never Read; Plus Many of the Best Typos
From, “Behind a pseudonym, literary provocation”
James Campbell’s ‘NB by J.C.’ brings together the columns of an incendiary cultural critic. . . .
By Michael Dirda – May 12, 2023
Even before catching up with the latest scholarly kerfuffle in the Letters column, readers of Britain’s Times Literary Supplement turn first to its last page. There, one can find a weekly feature somewhat enigmatically titled NB, the Latin abbreviation for “nota bene,” which could be translated as “pay close attention.”
Overall, NB might be loosely described as a gossip column for the erudite, but during the first 20 years of the present century, James Campbell made it into something more — a uniquely personal miscellany of wit, weirdness and waspish provocation. Continue reading Maybe The Best Column I Never Read; Plus Many of the Best Typos
The Island of Two Stories: Part Four of Four
FOUR: Bringing Them, Home, and Bringing It Back
I managed to draft about sixty pages of my Nantucket novel, and several episodes of the quilt story, before cash ran too low for more room rent. Reluctantly I took the ferry back to the twentieth century, presented my carefully stashed return bus ticket, and jiggled and scribbled my sore butt back to Baghdad on the Bay.Continue reading The Island of Two Stories: Part Four of Four