- Clive Thompson on the death of the phone call
- Pew on how Americans get their news now
- “Artists Find Backers as Labels Wane,” on the shifts in the structure of the music industry (counterpoint: “The Web’s Elusive Promise of a DIY Career in the Arts”)
- “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age”
- Pete Holmes on Google
- Louis C.K. vs. smartphones and Daniel Engber’s rebuttal
- “The infertility timebomb: Are men facing rapid extinction?”
- 100 years of style in 100 seconds
- “Ancient Aliens, Scientism, and the Need for Myth,” on the rise of the “paranormal edutainment complex”
- “The Rise of the NBA Nerd”
- “From Hogwarts to Harvard: Survival Games for the 21st Century”
- “Brain Gain,” on the rise of neuroenhancing drugs
- three things on drones: how robot drones revolutionized the face of warfare, “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man”, and the “Living Under Drones” report
Lastly, here’s one more example from RCL’s own Jessica O’Hara, who has posted a link to an essay she wrote for an edited volume on the philosophy of horror. The essay is entitled “Making Their Presence Known: TV’s Ghost-Hunter Phenomenon in a ‘Post-‘ World,” and you can find it on Google Books here. She calls particular attention to the “Spectres of 9/11” section, near the end of the essay, as an example of paradigm shift argumentation. Here’s Jessica talking about the development of the essay:
When I developed this essay, at first, all I knew was that I wanted to write on ghost-hunter shows because I liked them and the Paranormal State people were local. The section about 9/11 came out of my realization that the structure of ghost-hunter shows mimicked HGTV home-improvement shows. Once I made that connection, which amused me, I started to wonder why both genres of shows appeared this past decade. Then I connected their rise to the rhetoric of home improvement, which imagines the home as a “sanctuary.” Why does the home need to be a sanctuary? I thought about this question in relation to 9/11, the emergent dread of public spaces, and the decline in organized religion.