Encouraging Independent Thinking

Students often don’t know why they’re learning something. Asking why is so important to kids and they deserve a better answer than “because it will be on the test.” By the time kids reach middle school, they give up asking and focus on getting a good grade. To in- crease curiosity, it is important to address the “why” questions. Why are we reading Hamlet? Why are we solving quadratic equations? When teachers answer these questions, it prompts kids to think more deeply about the implications of what they’re learning.

Parents can elicit curiosity in their children through similar methods. We don’t need to have the right answers all the time, but we need to encourage kids to ask the right questions. If we don’t know the answer, we can say, “Let’s find out. Do some research on Google, and we can go from there.”  

When we support curiosity, what we’re really developing is a child’s imagination. Which brings me to creativity, a wonderful by-product of independence and curiosity.

Esther Wojcicki, How to Raise Successful People

What you don't become

It’s not what you are, it’s what you don’t become that hurts. -Oscar Levant 

Career Success is Not Enough

Success spares you from the shame you might experience if you feel yourself a failure, but career success alone does not provide positive peace or fulfillment. If you build your life around it, your ambitions will always race out in front of what you’ve achieved, leaving you anxious and dissatisfied.

David Brooks writing in The New York Times

The Root of Your Procrastination

People envision outcomes so outstanding that their expectations become more intimidating than inspirational. "It's like you're practicing the high jump, and when you set the bar too high, you look at it, and you walk away," says John Perry, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford. "Perfectionists aren't people who do something perfectly. Perfectionists are people who fantasize about doing something perfectly."  

At its core, procrastination represents shoddy treatment of the one person who should matter most to you: the future you. Resolving not to do some odious task today makes procrastinators feel good. Then they predict they'll feel just as good tomorrow, which will make the task easier. Of course, the next day they feel worse, which makes the task harder and the stress greater. Homer Simpson summed it up neatly: "That's a problem for future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy."   

Leigh Buchanan writing in Inc.

Changes to the Associated Press style guide

Accent marks: Accent marks can now be used with people’s names when they ask for it, are known to use them or if quoting from a language that uses them.

Casualties: Avoid the word because it is vague and can refer to either injuries or deaths. Instead, be specific.

Cocktail: Don’t use in reference to a mixture of drugs. Instead, use "drug combination" or simply drugs or medications.

Data: Now takes a singular verb and pronoun except in academic and scientific papers. In data journalism contexts: The data is sound. However, in scientific and academic writing, plural verbs and pronouns are preferred.

Hyphens: No longer use hyphens for African American, Filipino American, and compounds as “third-grade teacher” and “chocolate-chip cookie.” When using compound adjectives formed with “well” (suspensive hyphenation) such as well known, well fed, well dressed, hyphenate before the noun but not after. Do not use a hyphen with double-“E” combinations such as “preelection,” “preeminent,” “preempt,” “reenter,” etc.  

Latinx: The use of gender-neutral Latinx “should be confined to quotations, names of organizations or descriptions of individuals who request it and should be accompanied by a short explanation.

Marijuana: Pot or cannabis is OK on the second reference.  Dispensary employees are budtenders.  

Percentage: The percentage sign is OK to use with a numeral (no space between) instead of writing out “percent” or “percentage.” Example: “His mortgage rate is 4.75%.” For amounts less than 1%, precede the decimal with a zero: Example: “The cost of living rose 0.6%.” 

In the early part of the 20th century, a common rendering was “per cent.,” two words with a period after the “cent,” possibly because it was abbreviating the Italian “per cento.” The first formal AP stylebook, in 1953, called for “per cent,” and that stuck at least through the 1970 stylebook. By 1977, though, it had come together as “percent.” That’s common in the United States, though British English leans towards “per cent.”

            Merrill Perlman writing in the Columbia Journalism Review 

Race: Whether a subject is black or white need not be reported unless it’s pertinent to the story. Avoid calling someone “a black” or “a white.” Limit the use of the terms “blacks” and “whites” as plurals. Black and white are acceptable as adjectives when relevant.

Racism: OK to use “racist” or “racism” instead of euphemisms like "racially charged."

(sic): Do not use (sic) to show that quoted material or person’s words include a misspelling, incorrect grammar or peculiar usage. If it has to be explained, explain it outside the quotation, or just paraphrase the quotation.

Split infinitives: OK to use. Avoid awkward constructions (to leave, to help, etc.) or compound forms (had left, are found out, etc.).

Suspect: Avoid when talking about a person of unknown identity who committed a crime. Correct: Police said the robber stole 14 diamond rings; the thief ran away. Incorrect: Police said the suspect stole 14 diamond rings; the suspect ran away. Correct: Police arrested the suspect the next day. Incorrect: Police arrested the robber the next day.

More info:

A full list of the changes here.

AP Stylebook adds new umbrella entry for race-related coverage, issues new hyphen guidance and other changes ACES

Previewing a new edition of the AP Stylebook

Dropped Hyphens, Split Infinitives, and Other Thrilling Developments from the 2019 American Copy Editors Society Conference New Yorker

AP Stylebook update: It’s OK to call something racist when it’s racist Poynter

AP says the percentage sign now OK when used with a numeral (that’s shift+5) Poynter

Articles of Interest - May 6

***JOURNALISM

Remembering Nellie Bly, Rabblerouser and Pioneer of Investigative Journalism  Mental Floss  

40 Years After 'Star Wars' Error, Newspaper Apologizes To Wookiee Community  NPR

How German journalists are using Snapchat to teach teens about the Holocaust  Washington Post

***PRESS FREEDOM DAY 

On the eve of World Press Freedom Day, yet another journalist is killed in Mexico  Washington Post

World Press Freedom Day Interview with Laura Ling  StoryHunter

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

“We’re drinking now”: The oldest newspaper in New Orleans just fired its entire staff  Vice  

Public Relations Jobs Boom as Buffett Sees Newspapers Dying  Bloomberg

***FAKE NEWS

The existential crisis plaguing online extremism researchers  Wired

Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories  The Guardian 

***STUDENT MEDIA  

On Their Last Day, Student Newspaper Editors Cover a Shooting on Their Campus  Charlotte Magazine 

Profile of student porn worker allowed to run in Stockton high school newspaper  LA Times

***TECHNOLOGY

The 25 Most Absurd Job Titles In Tech  CBI Insights 

Editing Genes To Change Human Traits Is A Tall Order  NPR

How a Google Street View image of your house predicts your risk of a car accident  MIT Tech Review

***BIG DATA & AI 

Rocket Lab launches 3 experimental military satellites into space for the Defense Department  Axios 

A company scammed NASA for nearly two decades and cost them two satellites  Bloomberg

Looking at how machine learning and artificial intelligence are affecting IT  Tech Republic

A new realm of legal exposure for writing code  Wired 

The basic differences between artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science  Code Mentor

 ***SOCIAL MEDIA 

Inside The AOC Meme Machine: fans and enemies alike are inventing a new kind of politics  BuzzFeed News

Twitter now lets you add GIFs to retweets  Cnet

Hundreds Have Died In Selfie-Related Deaths Since 2011  NPR

***FACEBOOK

Facebook debuts new look and features to help move past 'old issues'  CNN

Facebook's AI problems  Wired 

Facebook bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and others from its platforms as 'dangerous'  CNN

***PRIVACY & SECURITY 

Your phone isn’t really spying on your conversations—the truth might be even creepier  Quartz

 7 Simple Ways to Protect Your Digital Privacy  New York Times 

***INTERNET

Putin signs law to create an independent Russian internet  CNN  

How to stay productive when there's no internet  Popular Science 

The dark web is smaller, and may be less dangerous, than we think  Tech Republic

 ***PERSONAL GROWTH 

How to Grieve  Becoming (my blog)

***GRAMMAR 

Credit card fraud suspects nabbed over careless typo  New York Post 

Microsoft debuts Ideas in Word, a grammar and style suggestions tool powered by AI  Venture Beat 

5 sites for checking your grammar  Komando 

***WRITING & READING

University of Tennessee journalism professor accused of plagiarism in a report for a conservative advocacy group  Knox News  

“Are there cross-cultural differences in plagiarism  SSRN

***LITERATURE

How SparkNotes' social media accounts mastered the art of meme-ing literature  Mashable

Four books by Asian American authors republished as Penguin Classics  NBC News

Classic Children’s Books Now Digitized and Put Online  Smithsonian  

Wikipedia edit-a-thon wants to fill in the gaps in Asian American literature  NBC News

Young adult literature lacks diverse authors  The Signal  

***POETRY 

Poetry Saved my Life: Indiana Poets are healing and connecting with their communities  Indy Star 

2019 Poetry Out Loud National Champion: Isabella Callery  National Endowment for the Arts 

Google's poetry algorithm automates teen angst Engadget

***GENDER    

Some States Still Shield Spouses From Prosecution When They Rape Their Partners  NPR

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES 

Sociologist who studies whiteness is again in trouble for his comments about race  Inside Higher Ed

The gap between the number of blacks and whites in prison is shrinking  Pew Research Center

She’s Asian and female: But she’s not me  The Washington Post

Senseless hate': the far right's deep roots in southern California  The Guardian

Expelled in 1956, Black Woman Gets Doctorate At U of Alabama  Afro

Colorism in High Fashion  Pudding

Doane U suspends library director over exhibit that included 1920s-era students in blackface Inside Higher Ed

OU graduate suing university over gender discrimination  News-9

Research on Iowa counties that swung from Obama to Trump indicates that GOP success was driven far more by sexism and racism than by economic anxiety  PS Mag

***RELIGION

 Rachel Held Evans, popular Christian writer, dies at 37  CNN

Died: Warren Wiersbe, Preachers’ Favorite Bible Commentator  Christianity Today

'Hail Satan?' review: Taking on the Christian nation, the devil's way  Chicago Tribune   

Landlord ordered to pay $675,000 for refusing to lease to Muslims  KCBD

With high levels of prayer, U.S. is an outlier among wealthy nations  Pew Research Center

Harvest Bible Chapel says no tithes or severance will go to former senior pastor who was fired  Chicago Tribune 

***RELIGION AND POLITICS 

Pete Buttigieg went to Jimmy Carter's Sunday school class and the former president invited him to read from the Bible  Business Insider

U.S. Jews are more likely than Christians to say Trump favors the Israelis too much  Pew Research Center 

***GOOD NEWS

Waving great-granny gets Valentine's Day surprise from Comox Valley teens  CBC News     

Chicagoan pulled over to help at an accident scene—ends up saving lives by getting donated organs to the hospital  Chicago Tribune

***ART & DESIGN 

Type in the digital era is a mess  Fast Company 

The best of National Geographic's 2019 Travel Photo Contest (so far)   The Atlantic 

What Is Performance Art?: We Explain It with Video Introductions and Classic Performances  Open Culture

The Insane History of Natural Pigments  Daily Infographic 

***MUSIC 

2019 Billboard Music Awards Winners: The Complete List  Billboard

Elizabeth Cotten Wrote “Freight Train” at 11, Won a Grammy at 90, and Changed American Music In-Between  Open Culture 

***FILM

Spoilers have been infuriating people since Victorian Times  Quartz

The Absolute Best Documentaries on Netflix  Thrillist

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA  

Broadcasting giant Sinclair to buy 21 regional sports stations from Disney for $10B  CNBC

***STUDENT LIFE

Tuition or Dinner? Nearly Half of College Students Surveyed in a New Report Are Going Hungry  New York Times

Predatory Journals Can Wreak Havoc a Student’s Wallet and Tarnish their Professional Reputation  The Runner

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT 

In lopsided vote, U.S. science academy backs move to eject sexual harassers  Science Mag

2 Swarthmore fraternities will disband after documents reveal references to 'rape attic' and racist behavior CNN 

Sexual Assault Within Military Is On The Rise  NPR  

Want to know how to handle a Me Too-related incident and related public relations snafu? Don't ask the Society for American Archaeology  Inside Higher Ed

***SOCIAL ISSUES 

Alabama Abortion Law Could Become Most Restrictive In The Country  NPR  

What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right  Washingtonian  

***BUSINESS & FINANCE

A 'miracle' healing gel, a cult-like following, and a fiercely protected empire  The Guardian

Where U.S. Housing Costs Hurt the Most  CityLab 

The big business of loneliness  Vox 

What the Science Says about Meeting Agendas  Linkedin

Australian company bans working on Wednesdays  BBC 

How Slack is ruining work  Vox

***CHINA 

Manspreading on the Beijing subway could give you bad social credit  Abacus News 

Chinese Noodle feast wins top prize for Food Photographer of the Year 2019  BBC 

China Detains Hundreds Of Thousands Of Muslims In 'Training Centers'  NPR

***ENVIRONMENT

Rural Students To Join In Classroom Walkout Over Climate Change  NPR

An autistic teenager from Sweden is trying to shame adults into action on climate change  The Week

Maine becomes the first state to ban Styrofoam  CNN 

Faceless Killer: The Invisible Threat of Air Pollution (book review)  Undark 

***HEALTH

Scientists Identify New Type of Brain Degeneration That Mimics Alzheimer's  TIME

Stanford discovery validates chronic fatigue syndrome  San Francisco Chronicle

Popular e-cigarette products contaminated with bacterial and fungal toxins, study finds  NBC News 

For Patients With Memory Loss, Working Towards Better Diagnosis  Undark

In major advancement for the 3-D printing of replacement organs, researchers demonstrate the printing of intricate blood vessel networks using living tissue  Rice 

***HEALTH: PREVENTATIVE 

Unscreen chemicals soak all the way into your bloodstream  Wired

Why some doctors are prescribing a day in the park or a walk on the beach for good health The Conversation

Is Conference Room Air Making You Dumber?  New York Times 

***VACCINES

Dengue Vaccine Controversy In The Philippines  NPR

Amid Measles Outbreaks, States Consider Revoking Religious Vaccine Exemptions  NPR

***TRAVEL

Romano Tours  SNL

Thousands of Fireflies Will Create a Spectacular Light Show in the Great Smoky Mountains  Afar  

How to Avoid Getting Bumped From a Flight   Life Hacker 

***SPORTS & GAMES

'Uno' wants you to stop pulling this illegal, but diabolical move  Mashable

***FOOD 

Eating More Rice Could Help Fight Obesity, Study Suggests  Bloomberg  

The 31 best Mexican restaurants in America  Thrillist 

***ANIMALS 

Teen cat whisperer recognized for clocking nearly 1,900 hours of dedication to feline friends  WBAL-TV

Why Are There So Many Books About Dogs?  New York Times 

***SCIENCE 

Side-By-Side ‘Genetic Portraits’ Of Family Members Show Just How Strong Family DNA Is  Bored Panda 

An immersive game in which teams solve science puzzles to unlock a mystery  New York Times 

***NEUROSCIENCE  

How to Memorize an Entire Chapter from “Moby Dick”: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything  Open Culture 

What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Mascots We Love and Hate  Adweek

***PRODUCTIVITY

How Exercise Affects Our Memory  New York Times 

The 6 best productivity podcasts for women  The Ladders 

***RESEARCH 

The Great Science Publishing Scandal (podcast)  BBC 

It is ever appropriate to use immorally acquired medical and scientific  Science Direct  

Scientific journal snubs academic over Sleeping Beauty metaphor  The Guardian

Facebook gives social scientists unprecedented access to its user data  Nature

***HIGHER ED

Esteemed judge to investigate claims against ASU economics department  KTAR

Five Staff Resign Without Discipline after Violating Title IX Policy  The Triton

An Expensive Startup Journey comes to an end: Wiley to Acquire Knewton’s Assets  Edsurge

Mike Pence stirs controversy over plans for commencement speech at Christian university in Indiana  USA Today

TD Jakes launches nonaccredited divinity school  Christian Post 

***LEARNING OUTCOMES 

Study of student learning outcomes  Inside Higher Ed

Study Analyzes Student Learning Outcome Statements and Assessments  Diverse Education

***ACADEMIC LIFE 

13 Yale Professors Threatened to Resign From Ethnic Studies: The University Listened  The Chronicle of Higher Education 

Contrary to received wisdom graduates from prestigious institutions aren’t more productive Chemistry World  

Former Dean Files $25 Million Defamation Lawsuit in Rankings Dispute  Inside Higher Ed

Yes, but

“We all know the phrase ‘Yes, but’ really means ‘No, and here’s why you’re wrong’,” says Rob Kendall, author of Workstorming. A conversation expert, Kendall sits in on other people’s meetings as an observer. The phrase “Yes, but” is one of the classic warning signs that you’re in an unwinnable conversation, he says. “If you hear it three or more times in one discussion, it’s a sign that you’re going nowhere.”  Kendall advises shifting the conversation by asking the other person “What’s needed here?” or, even better, “What do you need?” “It takes you from what I call ‘blamestorming’ to a solution-focused outcome.”  

Rosie Ifould writing in The Guardian 

A Good Life

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

(Born April 30, 1945)

Articles of Interest - April 29

***TECHNOLOGY 

The Machine That Reads Your Mind (Kinda) and Talks (Sorta)  Wired 

Tiny robots powered by magnetic fields could help drug-delivery nanoparticles reach their Targets  MIT

In 1983, This Bell Labs Computer Was the First Machine to Become a Chess Master  IEEE Spectrum 

Amazon is testing a Spanish Language Alexa Experience  Tech Crunch 

***BIG DATA & AI 

Consider the system that integrates humans and machines – not as artificial intelligence but extended intelligence  Wired

Neuroscientists use artificial intelligence to develop speech-decoding device capable of translating brain signals into speech  Nature  

Startups are racing to commercialize DeepFakes’s powerful, internet-breaking AI  Fast Company 

3 startups commercializing Deepfakes media manipulation tech  Fast Company 

How to prepare for a career in machine learning and artificial intelligence  Tech Republic

Artificial Intelligence VS Machine Learning VS Data Science  Code Mentor

Media group says it has created a tool that uses machine learning to identify articles evoking positive feelings  Digiday  

How to hide from everyday surveillance cameras in the AI surveillance state  MIT Tech Review

Walmart takes a deep dive into artificial intelligence in its physical store  Associated Press 

The Nat Nuclear Sec Admin is making a play to save a scientific advisory group of elite scientists that the Pentagon is looking to shut down  Defense News 

 ***SOCIAL MEDIA 

CIA is officially on Instagram  ABC News  

TikTok's quirky videos can nab you your 15 seconds of fame  Cnet  

Kidfluencers’ are earning millions on social media, but who owns that money?  The Guardian

How Americans use Twitter: Key takeaways from our new study  Pew Research Center 

LA’s plan to reboot its bus system—using cell phone data  Wired 

***FACEBOOK

Facebook never delivered its "Clear History" feature BoingBoing 

How Fox News dominates Facebook in the Trump era  Vice

The rise and fall of Facebook’s memory economy  Wired 

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA  

Sinclair plots national expansion  Axios

Vice Media Restructures, Folds 'Noisy,' 'Broadly,' 'Tonic' Into Flagship Site  MediaPost  

Media group says it has created a tool that uses machine learning to identify articles evoking positive feelings  Digiday 

***JOURNALISM 

27 incredibly useful things you didn’t know Google Sheets could do  Fast Company

Study: Journalists need help covering misinformation  Poynter 

Counteracting Health Misinformation: A Role for Medical Journals?  JAMA Network

Reporters Committee, NBC 7 San Diego sue U.S. immigration agencies for violating FOIA  Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press

A 101 on machine learning in the newsroom  Columbia Journalism Review 

Andrew Yang, the most meme-able 2020 candidate, also wants to save journalism  Harvard’s Nieman Lab  

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

A doorbell company owned by Amazon wants to start producing “crime news”  Harvard’s Nieman Lab 

Smart Speaker Use Is Growing. Will News Grow With It?  Harvard’s Nieman Lab  

***FAKE NEWS  

Students Fall for Misinformation Online: Is Teaching Them to Read Like Fact Checkers the Solution?  Chronicle of Higher Education 

6 Conspiracy Theories Promoted By OANN, Trump’s New Favorite ‘News’ Outlet  Hill Reporter

After Trump calls media "fakers," WHCA president slams "unpresidential" rhetoric  Axios

Fake Video: World Leaders Sing Imagine   YouTube

***PRIVACY & SECURITY  

Millions using 123456 as password, security study finds  BBC

How Big Tech’s cozy relationship with Ireland threatens data privacy around the world  Politico  

Google knows everywhere you go — here's how to stop it from tracking you and delete the logs  CNBC 

***PRODUCING MEDIA 

A new startup helps podcasts get promoted on other podcasts  The Verge

Overcast Podcast Player Gains Audio and Video Clip-Sharing Feature  Mac Rumors

***INTERNET 

How healthy is the internet?  Mozilla

Google Inbox’s co-creator wants to fix Gmail with a new Chrome extension  The Verge

This map showing the fastest and slowest internet speeds in the US could predict the path of a Silicon Valley startup exodus  Business Insider 

The 4 Questions to Ask before You Unplug  Jstor 

***PERSONAL GROWTH 

When Are You Really an Adult?  Becoming (my blog) 

How to Actually, Truly Focus on What You’re Doing  New York Times

***GRAMMAR

Dropped Hyphens, Split Infinitives, and Other Thrilling Developments from the 2019 American Copy Editors Society Conference  New Yorker  

Merriam-Webster adds 640 new words to its English dictionary  Merriam-Webster

***WRITING & READING 

Routine Over Talent: The Interesting Habits Of 11 Famous Writers  Minutes Magazine  

The story of handwriting in 12 objects  BBC 

The Numbers on Romance novels  Quartz

***LANGUAGE

Foreign languages ought to be an asset for politicians—not a liability  Economist  

Over 400 languages spoken today may have originated in northern China New Scientist

***LITERATURE

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in Vintage Recordings from the Early 1950s  Open Culture 

White nationalists interrupt Antiracist Book Festival at Politics and Prose  WTOP

Trivial Pursuit: The Shakespeare Edition Has Just Been Released: Answer 600 Questions Based on the Life & Works of William Shakespeare  Open Culture

Harper Lee, true crime writer  CBS News 

***GENDER   

‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’  New York Times 

Wife-tracking apps are one sign of Saudi Arabia’s vile regime  The Guardian 

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

The racial bias built into photography  New York Times 

Is there a trade-off between racial diversity and academic excellence in gifted classrooms?  Hechinger Report

***LEGAL ISSUES 

Chalking tires to enforce parking rules is unconstitutional, court finds  NBC News

Quest for food stamp data lands newspaper at Supreme Court  Associated Press 

Roy Moore Is Still Fighting In Court With Sacha Baron Cohen As He Eyes Another Senate Run  BuzzFeed News

***LEGAL ISSUES: COPYRIGHT

A US photographer could lose some or all of a $450,000 jury award   Bloomberg Law 

Court reverses misguided fair use ruling  Photo District News 

Photographer Sues for Failure to Provide Creative Commons-Required Attribution Technology & Marketing Law Blog 

***CRIME  

We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct: Now you can read their records  USA Today 

Navy SEALs Were Warned Against Reporting Their Chief for War Crimes  New York Times

***RELIGION

United Methodist Court Keeps Core of New LGBT Legislation  Christianity Today 

God, Guns, and Country: The Evangelical Fight Over Firearms  New Yorker

Half of Americans Say Evangelicals Are Discriminated Against  Christianity Today  

BYU speaker comes out during commencement speech  The Salt Lake Tribune

‘Hail Satan?’ examines the rise of the satanic temple  World Religion News  

India Proposes Controversial Bill Making Religion a Criteria for Refugee Citizenship  NPR

***CHURCHES

Churchgoing: The US is on a path towards secularism  Economist 

Places Of Worship Are Increasingly Becoming Targets Of Extremist Violence  NPR

Megachurch terminated from national accreditation group because of former senior pastor's 'discretionary account'  Chicago Tribune  

Evangelical churches can become 'seedbeds for rape culture,' seminary professor says  Christian Post 

***RELIGION AND POLITICS

2020 Election Revives Debate: Should Religious Faith Guide One's Voting?  NPR 

Franklin Graham rails against Buttigieg for calling himself 'gay Christian'  The Hill 

Franklin Graham Tells Buttigieg to ‘Repent’ Being Gay  Washington Post

2020 Democrats Invited To Iowa Evangelical Forum 'To Dig Deeper'  NPR  

How Trump has changed white evangelicals’ views about morality  Washington Post

2020 Democratic Candidates Are Reaching Out To Religious Voters  NPR

***POLITICS

Meet the Woman Behind the Buttigieg Media Frenzy  Politico

Jared Diamond explores how countries respond to crises  Economist 

How The New Movements, Not The Old Media, Are Driving Politics  BuzzFeed News   

In many countries, dissatisfaction with democracy is tied to views about economic conditions, personal rights  Pew Research Center 

***GOOD NEWS

Photo of 3 Alabama men who kept widow company at restaurant goes viral  Fox News

Cop Saves An Elderly, Hearing-Impaired Man From An Oncoming Train  Digg

Police officer drives Illinois man to job interview after pulling him over  KSDK-TV   

Teen learned CPR at high school: Two weeks later, he used it to save his dad  The Wichita Eagle

He ran out of sick days to stay with his cancer-stricken daughter, so teachers donated their sick days  CNN

***ART & DESIGN

London Extinction Rebellion mural is a Banksy, says expert  The Guardian

Frida Kahlo: The unapologetic artist  CBS News 

***MUSIC 

The Luck Reunion is the anti-Coachella  Fast Company  

Why Do Sad People Like to Listen to Sad Music? Psychologists Answer the Question in Two Studies  Open Culture 

***FILM

55 details you may have missed in 'Avengers: Endgame'  This is Insider

'Gosh!' An oral history of 'Napoleon Dynamite'  Desert News

***STUDENT MEDIA  

‘Free speech isn’t free, is it?’: A story on a teen porn worker could cost a high school journalism teacher her job  Washington Post

Student journalists are breaking big stories  Axios 

The Student Journalists of Stoneman Douglas High Earned a Rare Honor at This Year’s Pulitzers  Mother Jones

***STUDENT LIFE

Charges dropped for University of Arizona students who protested Border Patrol  AZ Central  

The story of a man running a cult out of his daughter’s dorm room  The Cut  

 ***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT 

More than 12,000 Boy Scout members were victims of sexual abuse  ABC News

The shocking rape trial that galvanised Spain’s feminists – and the far right  The Guardian 

Man who pleaded guilty to raping 14-year-old girl gets no jail time  WKYT  

***SOCIAL ISSUES 

Rehab programs turn into form of cheap labor:  They worked in sweltering heat for Exxon, Shell and Walmart and didn’t get paid a dime  Reveal News  

Half Of Americans Think The Smell Of Weed In Public Is A Real Problem  BuzzFeed News  

Americans' Stress, Worry and Anger Intensified in 2018  Gallup

By 2045, the U.S. as a whole is projected to become majority minority  Axios 

***IMMIGRATION 

Judge gives US 6 months to identify children split at border  Assoiciated Press  

Asylum in America  The Week

***BUSINESS & FINANCE

Can Your Employer Fire You After You Quit?  Life Hacker 

FBI director addresses efforts by China to steal academic research and technology  Inside Higher Ed  

***ENVIRONMENT

The soothing, hypnotic colors of tulip season, seen from above  Quartz 

Climate change being fuelled by soil damage   BBC 

***HEALTH 

35 Years Of American Death  FiveThirtyEight 

The Unseen Crisis of Drug Shortages  Bloomberg 

Measles outbreak over 700: Continues Unabated  New York Times

A pill that tells doctors whether you’ve taken it  Washington Post

How to give voice to the speechless: Listen to, and translate, their brainwaves  Economist

Why Your Doctor’s White Coat Can Be a Threat to Your Health  New York Times 

Screening for lung cancer is a controversial idea But the evidence now suggests it can work  Economist

***VACCINES 

What anti-vaxxers are actually afraid of (it's not all about autism)   BigThink

'Brady Bunch' Episode Fuels Campaigns Against Vaccines And Marcia's Miffed  NPR

***TRAVEL

Sri Lanka was Lonely Planet's No. 1 travel destination for 2019. The attacks are ‘a big blow’  LA Times 

***SPORTS & GAMES

‘Jeopardy!’ Quiz: The Questions James Holzhauer Got Wrong  Vulture

How hard a golf hole is does not depend solely on how hard it is Economist  

***FOOD

The Raisin Industry  New York Times

How Technology is Changing the Food Industry Forbes

***FAMILY

Getting married in your 30s is the new normal  Quartz 

U.N. recommends no screen time for babies; only 1 hour for kids under 5  NBC News

Participation in the arts raises kids' self-esteem  Pacific Standard 

What’s the point of marriage? (opinion)  the Week 

***ANIMALS 

Rescue dog helps owner pick up trash across Arizona  NBC News 

Ape uses Smartphone 

Loyal dog stays by body of his master for two day until it is found  Daily Mail Online

How to Pay for Your Pet's Healthcare  Life Hacker  

***SCIENCE

The universe is expanding faster than previously thought  Johns Hopkins 

Dark Matter Gets a Reprieve in New Analysis  Quantam Magazine 

***PSYCHOLOGY 

Rich guys are most likely to have no idea what they’re talking about  Washington Post 

Minnesota moves toward banning 'conversion therapy' but it's still legal in many states  CNN  

***NEUROSCIENCE  

Many defendants turn to brain science  NBC News 

Brains of blind people adapt to sharpen sense of hearing, study shows  University of Washington

***PHILOSOPHY 

A Harvard Professor Explains What the Avengers Can Teach Us About Philosophy  Wired

***RESEARCH 

21 Dos and Don’ts for Journal Writers and Reviewers  Chronicle of Higher Education

It's 2019: Academic Papers Should Be Free  Undark 

Rein in the four horsemen of irreproducibility  Nature 

Should we introduce a dislike button for academic articles?  Journal of the Assocn for Information Science and Tech

USDA orders scientists to say published research is ‘preliminary’  The Washington Post

***HIGHER ED

Student slated to attend Western Michigan University beheaded in Saudi Arabia for ties to democracy  Detroit Free Press

Michigan adopts new policy after controversy over students turned down for letters of recommendation  Inside Higher Ed  

Palomar College board considers live-stream meetings  The Coast News  

Using AI to Make Knowledge Workers More Effective  Harvard Business Review 

Stanford Moves to Stop Supporting Its University Press  Inside Higher Ed  

They Complained About Their Office: Then Kean U. Took Their Jobs Away  Chronicle of Higher Education

***ONLINE SCHOOLS

An online school, wants to teach nursing  Economist  

National American University is latest for-profit chain to face financial turmoil Inside Higher Ed

***TEACHING

How One Professor Mines Student Comments to Improve Her Teaching  Chronicle of Higher Education 

When Are You Really an Adult?

What adulthood means in a society is an ocean fed by too many rivers to count. It can be legislated, but not completely. Science can advance understanding of maturity, but it can’t get us all the way there. Social norms change, people opt out of traditional roles, or are forced to take them on way too soon. You can track the trends, but trends have little bearing on what one person wants and values. Society can only define a life stage so far; individuals still have to do a lot of the defining themselves. Adulthood altogether is an Impressionist painting—if you stand far enough away, you can see a blurry picture, but if you press your nose to it, it’s millions of tiny strokes. Imperfect, irregular, but indubitably part of a greater whole.

Julie Beck writing in The Atlantic 

Time Pressure at Work

The typical form of time pressure in organizations today is what we call “being on a treadmill” – running all day to keep up with many different (often unrelated) demands, but getting nowhere on your most important work. That’s an absolute killer for creativity. Generally, low-to-moderate time pressure is optimal for creativity. But we did find some instances in which people were terrifically creative under high time pressure. Almost invariably, it was quite different from being on a treadmill. Rather, people felt like they were “on a mission”— working hard to meet a truly urgent deadline on an important project, and protected from all other demands.

Teresa Amabile talking about her book The Progress Principle  

Lies our Culture Tells Us

College mental health facilities are swamped, suicide rates are spiking, the president’s repulsive behavior is tolerated or even celebrated by tens of millions of Americans. At the root of it all is the following problem: We’ve created a culture based on lies.    

(Among them:) Rich and successful people are worth more than poorer and less successful people. We pretend we don’t tell this lie, but our whole meritocracy points to it. The message of the meritocracy is that you are what you accomplish. The false promise of the meritocracy is that you can earn dignity by attaching yourself to prestigious brands. The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional love — that if you perform well, people will love you.      

No wonder it’s so hard to be a young adult today. No wonder our society is fragmenting. We’ve taken the lies of hyper-individualism and we’ve made them the unspoken assumptions that govern how we live.

David Brooks writing in The New York Times

Articles of Interest - April 22

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA   

Inside the weird, and booming, industry of online influence Wired

Money magazine going out of print following failed sales auction  CNN 

'ESPN The Magazine,' 'National Geographic' Record Top Social Media Engagement Media Post

***JOURNALISM

2019 Pulitzer Prizes Are Announced By Columbia University  NPR  

Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few Learning from our errors in data visualisation  Medium 

Is it Okday for Journalist to Block a Critic (not a troll, just a critic) on Twitter  Harvard’s Nieman Lab 

US slides down global press freedom rankings amid warning of 'climate of fear' for journalists  CNN

Quest for food stamp data lands newspaper at Supreme Court  Associated Press

Sarah Huckabee Sanders Accuses Media of Anti-Liar Bias  The New Yorker

 Student journalists were barred from a Betsy DeVos event. So they took her to task in an editorial  Washington Post

***FAKE NEWS 

Viral lies spread before Indian and Indonesian elections  Axios

YouTube's algorithm mistook the fire at Notre Dame cathedral for the 9/11 attacks in New York City  The Verge

Facebook teams with rightwing Daily Caller in factchecking program  The Guardian 

How 11 People Try to Stop Fake News in the World’s Largest Election  Bloomberg ***PERSONAL GROWTH 

 The Great Mystery  Becoming (my blog)

When Doctors Thought ‘Wanderlust’ Was a Psychological Condition  Atlas Obscura

Just do it? Or Stop and Think about it?  Aeon

***SOCIAL MEDIA 

TikTok sensation Lil Nas X rewrites the rules of country music  Axios 

Social media in the Middle East  Journalism.co  

WhatsApp Has Become A Hotbed For Spreading Nazi Propaganda In Germany  BuzzFeed News

LinkedIn editor-at-large Jessi Hempel interview on Peter Kafka podcast   Recode

Stop Facebook’s targeted advertising by changing your account settings  Fox News

Snap's Board Facing Blowback for Not Disclosing Whistle-Blower Lawsuit in IPO  Hollywood Reporter 

Trump's 2020 plan: Target seniors on Facebook  Axios 

***MOBILE 

Popular Apps In Google's Play Store Are Abusing Permissions And Committing Ad Fraud  BuzzFeed News 

***GRAMMAR

The Mueller report has two spaces after every sentence  Quartz

Can you spot the spelling and grammar mistakes in these tattoos?  Inked 

***WRITING & READING

Graffiti punished by reading - 'It worked!' says prosecutor  BBC  

Billy Collins Teaches Poetry in a New Online Course  Open Culture

***PLAGIARISM 

Compression plagiarism: Turning a lengthy scholarly text into a short one, followed by the publication of the short one under a new name without inadequate credit to the original author  Springer

Tracking Father Rosica's (very) long history of plagiarism  National Post  

***LITERATURE

Victor Hugo's 'Hunchback Of Notre Dame' Immortalized French Cathedral  NPR

Should Walt Whitman Be #Cancelled? Black America talks back to “The Good Gray Poet” at 200 (opinion)   Daily Jstor  

"To Kill a Mockingbird": A story for our time  CBS News 

***GENDER   

Agriculture census data shows the US has more female farmers than ever  Pacific Standard

Why Female Surfers Are Finally Getting Paid Like Their Male Peers  The Atlantic 

Why did the suffragettes write one of their fiercest fighters out of their history?  Pacific Standard 

Women’s faces may hide infidelity better than men’s  Newsweek

Council Bluffs students hold walkout over transgender student seeking to use women's bathroom   Omaha World Herald 

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

TSA Agents Say They’re Not Discriminating Against Black Women, But Their Body Scanners Might Be  ProPublica 

Inside a White-Nationalist Cookout  Rolling Stone 

Major U.S. cancer center ousts ‘Asian’ researchers after NIH flags their foreign ties  Science Mag

Teens Behind Racist Graffiti Received An Unusual Sentencing. But Did It Work?  NPR

Microsoft staff are openly questioning the value of diversity  Quartz  

Companies Continue To Stumble Over Racially Offensive Advertising Campaigns  NPR

A 'hero among heroes,' it's time this WWI soldier be recognized for his valor  Washington Post  

Ancestry.com Apologizes for Ad Showing Slavery-Era Interracial Couple  New York Times

Chapman University Film School Removes 'Birth of a Nation' Posters After Student Protests Hollywood Reporter

***KATE SMITH  

Yankees Suspend Use of Kate Smith's 'God Bless America' amid Racism Allegation  Bleacher Report

Flyers remove Kate Smith statue outside stadium  ESPN

***LEGAL ISSUES 

Advocacy Groups Train Lawyers Of All Kinds To Help With Immigration Cases  NPR

Meteorologist sues NBC-affiliate, says firing was defamatory  iMedia Ethics

Without Using Profanity, Supreme Court Justices Discuss Case Centered On Bad Language  NPR  

Creative Commons and the Fight for a More Robust Public Domain  The Fashion Blog

***TECHNOLOGY 

The world's largest airplane is set to launch satellites  The Verge  

How recommendation algorithms run the world  Wired 

***PRIVACY & SECURITY 

How to build a facial recognition system w/publicly available data for $100  New York Times

The FBI wanted a backdoor to the iphone: Tim Cook said no  Wired 

Millions of Instagram users had their passwords exposed  Quartz

***PRODUCING MEDIA

Podcast Consumer 2019   Edison Research 

***INTERNET 

How to use Gmail's best new feature for 2019  Cnet 

10% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?  Pew Research Center

***RELIGION

Bestselling Christian author Rachel Held Evans put in medically Induced Coma  Al.com

Gospel for Asia Settles Lawsuit with $37 Million Refund to Donors  Christianity Today

Ohio church apologizes after pastor encourages students to spit on him, cut him with knife  NBC News 

U.S. Church Membership Down Sharply in Past Two Decades  Gallup

Chinese Immigrants Are Converting to Catholicism:  Local Churches Have Adapted  New York Times 

'Church' to offer 'miracle cure' despite FDA warnings against drinking bleach  The Guardian

A resurrection in faith-based films  CBS News

Hitler hated Judaism. But he loathed Christianity, too  Washington Post   

A woman holding a baby and a gun interrupts San Diego church services with bomb threat  CNN   

***GOOD NEWS 

A Mentor Challenged Bright Math Students And Changed Their Lives  NPR

Canadian who had heart attack while jogging in Florida saved by stranger — from his hometown CBC News 

Video shows firefighters push man home in wheelchair  The Kansas City Star

***REALLY?!

What the Easter bunny does the rest of the year (video)  

10-Year-Old Maryland Girl Born Without Hands Wins Handwriting Contest (‘I Just Try My Hardest’) Baltimore  

A Woman Got 30 Days In Jail For Running Over Her 9-Year-Old Son After He Refused To Go To School BuzzFeed News

***FONTS 

Helvetica, the world's most popular font, gets a face-lift  Wired  

Why the US Government Just Made Its Own Font, Open Sans  MotherBoard

***MUSIC  

World Heavy Metal Knitting Championship to launch in Finland  Louder Sound

How the Vietnam War Shaped Classic Rock--And How Classic Rock Shaped the War  Open Culture 

Can Music be Medicine?  The Naked Scientists 

***SOCIAL ISSUES 

Selfie Deaths Are an Epidemic  Outside online 

The biggest change in US cities isn't gentrification, but poverty concentration  CityLab  

What an Olympic medalist, homeless in Seattle, wants you to know  Seattle Times  

15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook  Wired 

***THE BORDER

Rights group condemns U.S. 'vigilante' treatment of migrants on border  Reuters 

Telling parents to 'just relax' on college admissions perpetuates a broken system  LA Times

Inside The San Diego Church Where ICE And Border Patrol Bring Pregnant Women  BuzzFeed News

***BUSINESS & FINANCE

Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population  The Guardian

Here’s How TurboTax Just Tricked You Into Paying to File Your Taxes  ProPublica

Do You Earn Enough to Afford a House in the Largest U.S. Metros?  How Much

 ***ENVIRONMENT

The One Thing Millennials Haven’t Killed Is Houseplants  Bloomberg

How people worldwide view climate change  Pew Research Center

How Scientists Discovered What Dirty Air Does to Kids’ Health  CityLab

How Americans see climate change  Pew Research Center 

***HEALTH

Wake up, people: You're fooling yourself about sleep, study says  CNN

The Truth About Dentistry  The Atlantic 

Vitamin supplements don't help people live longer, study finds  NBC News

Bad diets killing more people globally than tobacco, study finds  The Guardian  

UCSD eye doctor broke human research rules, putting patients at risk  iNewsource 

***HEALTH COSTS 

High-Deductible Insurance Linked To Delays In Cancer Diagnosis And Treatment  NPR 

Physicians' salaries have once again hit an all-time high  Axios 

High-Deductible Insurance Linked To Delays In Cancer Diagnosis And Treatment  NPR  

***HEALTH RESEARCH 

Scientists Plan To Start Human Trials Testing CRISPR Soon  NPR

Israeli Researchers Print 3D Heart Using Patient's Own Cells  Bloomberg  

***VACCINES  

Washington state Senate passes vaccine bill in rebuke to anti-vaxxers  Washington Post   

Funding halted for Professor Chris Exley, who links vaccines to autism  The Times  

***TRAVEL 

Woman Wears 9 Lbs. of Clothing on Plane to Avoid $85 Overweight Baggage Fee  People

***SPORTS & GAMES

High school junior does what no MLB player has done before: Hit for home run cycle  USA Today

Jeopardy’s Prize Budget vs. James Holzhauer   The Atlantic

'Baseball Brit' Hopes To Attend 162 MLB Games This Season  NPR 

***FOOD 

The way we taste food changes as we age  Quartz

Why I Take All My First Dates to Olive Garden   Bonappetit

Excessive noise is the chief complaint diners have: Here’s an App to Help  Vox

***FAMILY

Here's How Wedding Photographers Know If The Couple Will End Up Divorced   Buzzfeed News

Family ties are unraveling globally  Axios 

How Parents Who Travel for Work Can Ease the Burden on Their Families  New York Times   

***CHILDREN 

Mapping Where Traffic Pollution Hurts Children Most  CityLab

2019’s Best & Worst States for Children’s Health Care  Wallet Hub

How much screen time is too much? Here are the limits 10 tech executives set for their kids  NBC News

***ANIMALS 

The 20 Most Pet-Friendly Cities in America  Mental Floss 

The mystery of Julian Assange’s cat: Where will it go? What does it know?  Washington Post

Dog Saved By Workers On Oil Rig, 135 Miles Off Thai Coast  NPR

***SCIENCE

Synthetic biology could bring a pox on us all  Wired 

***PSYCHOLOGY 

Research Confirms: When Receiving Bad News, We Shoot the Messenger  Harvard Business Review 

Music therapy for mental health  The Naked Scientists 

***HISTORY 

Stonehenge: DNA reveals origin of builders  BBC News 

50 Things Turning 50 in 2019  Mental Floss

***RESEARCH 

Research misconduct in health and life sciences research: A systematic review of retracted literature from Brazilian institutions  PLOS  

Gun Research Is Suddenly Hot  New York Times

Censorship in a China Studies Journal  Inside Higher Ed

Many people believe that public records laws are fundamental to democracy. But others say they’re being used to stifle public research  Undark 

Stanford clears a professor of any wrongdoing in his interactions with a Chinese researcher who created the first gene-edited babies  New York Times 

***HIGHER ED

A Yale Law School policy was meant to protect LGBTQ students: Other saw anti-Christian bias Washington Post

UW-Stevens Point Scraps Plans To Drop 6 Majors  Wisconsin Public Radio 

Telling parents to 'just relax' on college admissions perpetuates a broken system (opinion)  LA Times 

Some colleges receiving the most GI benefits spend the least on educating veterans, report says  Washington Post

The Students Called the TA a ‘Nazi.’ He Said He’s Not a White Supremacist: The University Ruled He Could Return to the Classroom  Chronicle of Higher Education

SDSU warns of possible meningitis exposure  FOX-5 

***ACADEMIC LIFE 

The Students Called the TA a ‘Nazi.’ He Said He’s Not a White Supremacist. The University Ruled He Could Return to the Classroom  Chronicle of Higher Education

Why this South Carolina teacher quit mid-year: 'The unrealistic demands and all-consuming nature of the profession are not sustainable’   Washington Post

What the Mueller Report Reveals About the Globe-Trotting Professor Who Spoke of ‘Dirt’ on Clinton  Chronicle of Higher Education

Professor Says Arizona State Forced Him to Fail Students: The University Says That’s ‘Unequivocally Wrong’ Chronicle of Higher Education

***STUDENT LIFE

This bot will do your homework for $9.95 a month. Does it actually work?  Vox

New Uber program aims to boost rider safety on college campuses  Cnet

21 Life-Changing Things That Don't Happen To You Until You're 25 BuzzFeed News

Sitins and Walkouts in Schools over Software  New York Times

The Great Mystery

The first-ever “photo” of a black hole. It’s an achievement once thought impossible, given that black holes exert such monstrous gravity that they swallow light itself. 

Over the last century, science has shown that our universe is a far stranger place than our everyday experience would suggest. Space itself is curved and warped by mass. Time slows down on an object the faster it travels. Electrons act both as particles and waves. “Entangled’’ particles seem to instantly know and react to what happens to their partner across vast distances. At the quantum level, there is no empty space: Particles constantly pop in and out of existence, creating an ephemeral quantum “foam.” At the other end of the scale, there are least 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, each containing billions of stars and probably more than a few planets where intelligent life has evolved and is puzzling over the same questions as we are. The more we discover, the more it becomes clear that our certainties, whatever they may be, are built on illusions. We live in a great mystery.  

William Falk writing in The Week Magazine 

The Gateway to Christianity

The Gateway to Christianity is not through an intricate labyrinth of dogma, but by a simple belief in the person of Christ. – William Lyon Phelps

God's son

God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering. – Saint Augustine

Do people work better when they are stressed?

It’s a dangerous fallacy to say that people perform better when they’re stressed, over-extended, or unhappy. We found just the opposite. People are more likely to come up with a creative idea or solve a tricky problem on a day when they are in a better mood than usual. In fact, they are more likely to be creative the next day, too, regardless of that next day’s mood. There’s a kind of “creativity carry-over” effect from feeling good at work. 

Teresa Amabile talking about her book Do people work better when they are stressed?

Tuesday Tech Tools: Video

Looking for some ways to help you shoot and edit video? Here are some of the available tools.

Adobe Connect
Video conferencing.

Clips
This Apple app let's you add text, filters, emoji, music, and opaque transition cards to your photos or videos. Intended to be fun, though the menu layout is not entirely intuitive and it does take some time to create. Free.

CuePrompter
Turns your browser into a television telepromoter.

Disco Videos
A way to add cool effects like music and filters to your videos. $3.99.

DSCO
Pronounced ‘disco’, this app is for GIF creation. Animations up to 2.5 seconds long. Free. Video example.

Ecamm
App that records Skype and Facetime. It lets you convert your calls into MP3 files for podcasting or easily move the video to YouTube and Vimeo. Split the audio tracks after a call for easy editing. $39.95.

Final Cut Pro
Video editing program.

Filmic
High definition mobile cam for videography, photography. Lots of bells and whistles probably too much for avarege person or even for what a professional journaist would need. $14.99.

GoToMeeting
Video conferencing. 14-day free trial. $14-$39 a month subscription.

Google Hangouts On Air* (going away in 2019)
Live streaming platform and automatic HD video capture that allows you to broadcast and record your Hangout to your YouTube channel.

GorillaPod tripod*
Joby GripTight PRO. Flexible legs wrap around objects for unlimited angles. From .7 - 11 pounds. Rubber foot grips provide stability on any surface.

HouseParty (formally Meerkat)
Group video chat app where users get a notice that friends are online. Snap Stories are integrated.

Hyperlapse
Instagram’s timelapse video. No audio option.

iMovie*
Two tracks of video and audio for editing on your phone or laptop. Free.

InVID
A free Firefox plugin to debunk fake video news and verify videos and images.

LumaFusion*
A multi-track video editor with 3 video/audio tracks for photos, videos, titles, and graphics. $19.99.

Meograph*
3D animation of people from 2D video of people. Video explanation.

Movavi
Video editing for casual users. Easy-to-use interface. Limited effects. $39.95.

MoviePro App*
Video recording app that lets you listen live to your sound, includes manual controls for exposure, focus, and white balance. Shoot stills while recording. Has a built-in single-track video editor. $5.99.

Narrative
Wearable camera that takes a photo or video every minute and creates a video at the end of the day (without using the repetitive shots). No work for the wearer. $199.

Quik
Video editor by GoPro. Easy-to-use. Add photos, text, music. Templated themes. Free.

Quicktime
Use to record video from your webcam and Skype interviews.

Periscope
Live-streaming video app from Twitter. Stores video for 24 hours. Will tweet followers that you are living streaming.

PickPlayPost
Video editor that lets users create slideshows, split screens, video collages, etc. adding music, voice, gifs. Best for short videos. Free.

Premiere Pro*
An Adobe professional-level product that has become the industry standard. Easy-to-use interface. Support for 360 VR and other features, but some techniques require additional applications (such as After Effects). $19.99 a month.

Reduct
Edit the video by editing the text. For instance, you can upload a long interview and the site (using machine learning) will transcribe the speech and tag each word to a visual frame allowing you to quickly generate a highlight reel or other edited videos.

Reel Director
Creates movies and lets you edit on phone similar to iMovie. $2.99.

Screenr
Chrome screen capture and annotation tool. Video explanation.

Scribble Live
Live-streaming. Create, curate and publish content to provide real time coverage and storytelling. Fee.

SMOVE smartphone Video Stabilizer
This smartphone stabilizer that doubles as a charger. Portable, fits in your pocket. $200. 

SpliceApp
A video editing app that works with music, photos, text or video clips. $3.99.

Steadicam Smoothee*
The Smoothee gives you a steady, gliding shot by a balanced weight system that holds your phone on a frictionless ball joint. Simple to use, though the size could interfere with other attachments on you iPhone. $90.

Steller*
Create photo and video stories on an iPhone with an emphasis on mobile design. Create collections and share on social networks. Free. Sample.

TechSmith (formally Jing)
A free, easy-to-use screen capture application. Snap a screenshot or record a video, save and share. capture a presentation, lecture, or event.

TimeLapse
High quality stock footage of time lapse video.

Transcriptive
Digital Anarchy’s plugin to create automated transcriptions of video in Premiere Pro. Free Trial. $299.

TubeMogul
Upload your video and TubeMogul will send it to many social media sites at one time-though you'll have to set up accounts with all the sites on your own.  Tracks viewership. A part of Adobe's Marketing Cloud.

Ustream*
Desktop broadcasting of live video to the world from a computer or iPhone (or watch thousands of shows).  30 day free trial, then monthly plans from $99 to $999 for pros, top subscription $2k and up.

Vimeo
Video hosting and editing. 

Video Scribe
Create animated videos, replicating the popular whiteboard-style tutorial.  7 day free trial. $16.50 a month.

VideoShop*
Edit video and post directly to Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Available for iPhone and Android (probably the best option for Android. $.1.99.

Videolicious*
App for easy photo and video editing on your iPhone. Free.

Vyond (formally GoAnimate)
Make animated videos. Free 14-day trial. Subscription plans: $39 a month or $299 each year.

YouTube Creator Hub
Resources to help create better video content and bigger audiences. An online community for serious YouTube creators.

Webex
Cisco’s video conferencing software. Easy-to-use, nothing to download. Several pricing plans-but not cheap.

WeVideo
Collaborative online and mobile video editing.

Xtranormal
Create animated movies.

Zamzar
Video and audio file converter.

More Tech Tools

Articles of Interest - April 15

***BIG DATA & AI  

How algorithms know what you’ll type next- deconstructing text predictors  Pudding 

Amazon’s empire rests on its low-key approach to AI  Economist  

Google launches end-to-end platform in an effort to democratize AI and Machine Learning  TechCrunch 

Does the Bayesian approach to statistics require a “subjective belief”?  Statistical Modeling  

Can a computer write a script? Machine learning goes Hollywood   LA Times  

A dozen things I wish I’d known before starting as a Data Scientist  Medium 

A snapshot of how programmers work  Tech Republic 

***JOURNALISM 

In the age of ‘enemy of the people’ rhetoric, do young people still want to be journalists?  Philly  

The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News  The New Yorker

'Crying girl' picture near US border wins World Press Photo of the Year  CNN

There are a lot of great journalism movies. Here are our top 25  Poynter   

Journalist David Carr As A Father In 'All That You Leave Behind'  NPR  

Many rural Americans say local news media mostly don’t cover their area  Pew Research Center 

It’s just in mice! This scientist is calling out hype in science reporting   Stat News

Devin Nunes Admits That His Bogus Defamation Lawsuits Are Really About Phishing For Journalists' Sources  TechDirt  

2019 Pulitzer Prizes Turn The Spotlight On Some Dangers Journalists Face  NPR

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM 

More than 30 media companies have unionized in the past 2 years  Axois

When local newspapers shrink, fewer people bother to run for mayor Harvard’s Nieman Lab 

The next big news fight is between Chinese aggregation apps  Axois 

Meet Frame, a weekly news magazine that lives in your calendar and text messages  Poynter 

Apple News+ gets off to a rocky start for some publishers  Digiday

Newspaper Racks For 'Tampa Bay Times' Come With Video Streaming, Advertising  Publishers Daily 

***FAKE NEWS

WorldNetDaily: "Inside the spectacular fall of the granddaddy of right-wing conspiracy sites   Washington Post 

Meet The People Fact-Checking The Election That Makes 2016 Look Like A Walk In The Park  BuzzFeed News

Why conspiracy theories are getting more absurd  Vox

Who needs deepfakes when bogus crowd photos get thousands of shares on Facebook?  Poynter 

Asian governments are trying to curb fake news  Economist 

Conspiracy theories, misinformation swirl online as Notre Dame burn  Daily Dot

  ***TECHNOLOGY

How much can we afford to forget, if we train machines to remember?  Aeon

Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa  Bloomberg

Forget The Black Hole Picture — Check Out The Sweet Technology That Made It Possible  FiveThirtyEight 

How photo booths escaped the brink of extinction by becoming FOMO generators The Verge  

 ***SOCIAL MEDIA  

Social media usage in U.S. remains unchanged despite a year of turmoil  Pew Research Center

Pinterest's Midwestern charm  Quartz 

An Influencer Shares How She Turned Instagram Into A Viable Living  Digg

***FACEBOOK

Facebook Tests Combining News Feed, Stories  Digital News Days

Facebook will stop asking you to wish your dead friends a happy birthday  Fast Company

The standalone Messenger app may be merging back into the flagship Facebook app  BGR

***MOBILE 

How to Run Diagnostics Tests on Your Smartphone  LifeHacker  

Is Your Smartphone Making You Fat?  WebMD  

***PRIVACY & SECURITY 

Hackers publish personal data on thousands of US federal agents  TechCrunch 

Microsoft webmail breach exposed email addresses and subject lines  Engadget 

Incognito mode won’t keep your browsing private. Do this instead  Fast Company

One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority  New York Times

Hackers could read non-corporate Outlook.com, Hotmail for six months  ArsTechnica

***INTERNET

Google testing 'Before' and 'After' commands that filter dates direct from the Search box  TechSpot 

What Women Know About the Internet: The digital world is not designed to keep women safe.. New regulations should be  New York Times

 ***PERSONAL GROWTH 

Would you be Willing?  Becoming (my blog)

How to become a more curious person  Quartz

Should We Have Empathy For Those We Hate?  NPR

How to prime your mind to make creative leaps and new discoveries  BigThink

You Are Not as Good at Kissing as You Think. But You Are Better at Dancing: We overestimate and underestimate our abilities in weird ways  New York Times  

***GRAMMAR

Real Language Analysis Should replace disembodied grammar instruction in schools   Economist 

Linguists found the world’s “weirdest” languages—and English is one of them  Quartz

***WRITING & READING 

How Writing Changed My Life & Career  Darius Foroux Blog 

Old-school writing tools will boost your creativity, concentration—and speed  Quartz

***LITERATURE

‘Extraordinary' 500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time  The Guardian  

Every Kurt Vonnegut Novel Ranked in Order of Relevance  Consequences of Sound  

Libraries are letting patrons pay off their fines by donating canned goods  Daily Item  

PBS' 6-Episode 'Les Misérables' Miniseries Focuses On The Story Instead Of Music  NPR  

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World (book review)   The Week

Wattpad, an online reading room, wants to print books  Economist 

***GENDER   

5 Fast Facts You Need to Know about the woman whose algorithm led to the first image of a black hole  Heavy 

Why Men Get Worse Forehead Lines and Wrinkles Than Women  Fatherly

Everything you need to know about the transgender military ban  Axios

Virginia Hall, the greatest spy you’ve never heard of  Economist  

New Augmented Reality App Celebrates Stories of Women Typically Omitted from U.S. History Textbooks  Open Culture 

London bookstore—devoted mostly to overlooked works by female writers—celebrates 20 years  New York Times 

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES 

New Report Takes A Deeper Look At How Latinos Experience Discrimination In The US  NPR

Deputy sheriff's son charged in connection with string of fires at historically black churches in Louisiana  CBS News 

The Civil Rights Activist Murdered by the Ku Klux Klan Whose Story Was Nearly Lost to History  A mighty Girl

The sons of slaveholders quickly recovered their fathers’ wealth  Economist 

Israel’s Election, Through the Eyes of a Young Palestinian  The New York Times

Thomas Mann Explains the Nazis' Ulterior Motive for Spreading Anti-Semitism in Rare 1940 Audio  Open Culture

Native American Women Are Facing a Crisis  New York Times  

As black activists protested police killings, homeland security worried they might join ISIS  The Intercept

Sharp Rise in the Share of Americans Saying Jews Face Discrimination  Pew Research Center  

Texas high schooler sends racist promposal on Snapchat  KVUE-TV

***FREE SPEECH

Anti-Transgender Speaker Sprayed During Talk  Inside Higher Ed

FUCT: An Unconstitutional Restriction of Speech or an Allowable Ban on "Scandal"?  The Fashion Law Blog  

***LAW & CRIME  

Kim Kardashian hopes to become lawyer in 2022 after four-year apprenticeship  BBC

Without Using Profanity, Supreme Court Justices Discuss Case Centered On Bad Language  NPR

Nebraska faces a prison-crowding emergency  Economist

***RELIGION

The fire at Notre Dame, a Catholic icon, was made even more heartbreaking by the timing Washington Post

What Pope Benedict's Letter On The Sex Abuse Scandal Means For Catholics  NPR

Southern Baptist seminary removes stained glass windows showing church leaders, Alabama pastor  Al.com

Little-Remembered Religious Preachers Get Their Due In 'American Messiahs'  NPR

Noah's Wife Gets A Name In 'Naamah' (author interview)  NPR 

'Why I joined a cult - and how I left'  BBC 

***RELIGION AND POLITICS

Steve Bannon and U.S. ultra-conservatives take aim at Pope Francis  NBC News 

Pence says Buttigieg bringing 'attacks on my Christian faith'  CNN

Trump: Am I being audited because I'm a Christian?  USA Today

***GOOD NEWS

Woman still riding motorcycles at 93 years old, rolls through Triad  FOX 8

20-year-old raising 5 siblings gifted new car from strangers  WTOL-TV 

New Jersey teen shares the stage with her service dog  CBS News 

***REALLY?! 

A Burglar Hiding In An Oregon Bathroom Turned Out To Be...A Trapped Roomba  BuzzFeed News

Woman does karate, son gets nude, dog steals cornbread mix from Walmart, police say  KY3

A cassowary bird killed a man in Florida  Quartz  

Drunk Florida man arrested at Olive Garden, eating spaghetti  Miami Herald

Man shoots himself and his daughter while trying to change her diaper at a Chuck E. Cheese  WBRC-TV 

***ART  

What’s Left of Notre Dame’s Art?  The Cut 

How Leonardo da Vinci made a “satellite” map in 1502  Vox

Art frenzy takes over Havana as biennial kicks off Reuters 

***GRAPHIC DESIGN

The History of Italics In Type  Kottke

Chobani, Glossier, and more are branching out into ’70s-style serif fonts  Vox

Behind the process of Helvetica’s 21-century facelift  The Verge

***MUSIC 

The Surprisingly Technical Process of Songwriting  Medium 

***FILM

'Long Day's Journey Into Night' Is a Mind-Boggling Feat  The Atlantic

Review: Netflix's 'Tijuana' Finally Offers Good TV About Journalists  Daily Dot

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA  

Johnson Publishing Co., the ex-publisher of Ebony and Jet, files for bankruptcy  Chicago Sun-Times 

A Wave of Consolidation among media companies  Economist 

Will It Soon Be Legal to Say Curse Words on Broadcast Television?  Hollywood Reporter

***FREELANCE WRITING

Freelancers to cover public media  Current.org  

Political news pitches  Medium  

Freelance pitches  Reader’s Digest

Pitches on travel, food or personal essays  Curiosity Magazine

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT  

Up against the invincible: A professor was convicted of sexual misconduct: Why is he still on campus?  Columbia Spectator  

A new study confirms: fraternity men and athletes are committing more sexual assaults than are those in the general student population and that repeat offenders are a major problem  Inside Higher Ed

Students accused of sexual assault are suing colleges — and winning most of the time  USA Today

 ***SOCIAL ISSUES 

The IRS Audits the Working Poor at a Higher Rate than Wealthier People  WNYC Studios  

6 demographic trends shaping the U.S. and the world in 2019  Pew Research Center

***THE BORDER

What’s happening at the U.S.-Mexico border in 6 charts  Pew Research Center

Photographing All 2,000 Miles of the US–Mexico Border  Wired 

The Borderlands — Not The U.S., Not Mexico, A Transitional Land  NPR

11-year-old ordered deported without her family  MSN 

***BUSINESS & FINANCE

What Qualifies as Middle-Income in Each State  FlowingData

H&M is Being Sued for Allegedly Collecting and Sharing Employees' Fingerprints  The Fashion Law Blog

***ENVIRONMENT

Are Plastic Bag Bans Garbage?  NPR

How Fake Meat Could Save the Planet  One Zero

***HEALTH

One Day There May Be a Drug to Turbocharge the Brain. Who Should Get It?  New York Times  

Are You Overdosing on Caffeine? Signs that your coffee habit is doing more harm than good  Outside Online 

Napping is good for you, experts say—if you do it the right way  Quartz

Invisible Middlemen Are Slowing Down American Health Care  The Atlantic

The Science Behind the Mental Clarity Diet  Medium 

Can wearing your heart (monitor) on your sleeve save your life? Doctors grapple with Apple Watch’s latest addition  Economist  

High Stress Can Lead To Heart Attacks, Sibling Study Finds. Here's How To Relax  NPR 

A Dying Nurse Is Claiming She Switched Thousands of Babies at Birth  Fatherly

***HEALTH: VACCINES

How Misinformation Is Driving the Measles Outbreak Among Ultra-Orthodox Jews  New York Times  

How Philadelphia Mandated Vaccinations In 1991  NPR

New York's Vaccine Order Shows How Health Laws Are Failing Us  Wired

Measles Cases Spike Driven By Outbreaks In N.Y. And 4 Other Regions  NPR

***TRAVEL

Why airlines make flights longer on purpose  BBC 

Beijing is building a colossal new airport  Economist 

Delta reduces how much passengers can recline their seats  Quartz  

***FOOD

Swiss government declares that coffee is not essential for survival  BBC

***GAMES & SPORTS

Professional Sports Bettor Sets 'Jeopardy' Single-Day Record  Bleacher Report  

Britain's Tara Moore saves match point at 0-6, 0-5 down – and goes on to win  The Guardian  

The Athletic's next arena is in podcasting  Axiox 

Our deep dive into how esports broadcasting differs from traditional sports  VentureBeat

***FAMILY

Kids Whose Parents Read to Them Understand Up to 1.4 Million More Words  Mental Floss

Want to raise successful kids? Harvard, MIT study says doing one thing at age 4 could make them happier and wealthier in life  CNBC 

For Anxious Kids, Parents May Need To Learn To Let Them Face Their Fears  NPR

***ANIMALS  

Study shows dogs can accurately sniff out cancer in blood  Science Daily

Border Collie Comes Out Of Nowhere, Saves Chihuahua From Being Run Over By Car  Digg

***SCIENCE

New Twitter account outs shoddy reporting in science stories  Quartz

The engineering of living organisms could soon start changing everything  Economist 

Emotional mirror neurons found in the rat  Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience

***MATH

Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply  Wired

The Mathematics of (Hacking) Passwords  Scientific American 

***PSYCHOLOGY  

Is evolution the key to understanding mental illness?  Economist 

The Most Important Question in Psychology Research  Psychology Today

***NEUROSCIENCE  

Deep brain stimulation in patients over 60 boosted short-term memory for up to an hour, making it comparable to an average 20-year-old  The Guardian

The violent attack that turned a man into a maths genius  BBC 

Kashfia Rahman: How risk-taking changes a teenager's brain  TED Talk

Doctors Use Electrical Implant to Aid Brain-Damaged Woman  New York Times

***HISTORY  

Reconstruction, one of the most misunderstood chapters in American history  CBS News

See the Oldest Printed Advertisement in English: An Ad for a Book from 1476  Open Culture

Telegram announcing Abraham Lincoln’s death is up for sale  Associated Press

Third-graders found error in their workbook about Columbus: Here’s what they did about it  Washington Post

***RESEARCH 

Fears that academia’s unhealthy obsession with publication metrics is worsening  ResearchResearch

Elsevier’s Presence on Campuses Spans More Than Journals: That Has Some Scholars Worried The Chronicle of Higher Education 

The Dissertation Publication Requirement: It’s Time for Reexamination  Scholarly Kitchen

Isaac Asimov once submitted a hoax paper  Futility Closet  

***RESEARCH ETHICS  

The study of a cancer test seemed like a triumph: But some data were missing  Stat News

Plagiarism in Predatory Publications: A Comparative Study of Three Nursing Journals  Sigma

When Public Discourse Mirrors Academic Debate: Research Integrity in the Media  Science and Engineering Ethics 

The replication “crisis” is good for science  The Conversation 

Train students to navigate ethical swamps  Nature 

Caught stealing a manuscript? blames a dead colleague  Retraction Watch  

***HIGHER ED 

What the College-Admissions Scandal Reveals  The Atlantic

Western Kentucky reinstated the dean its now ex-provost forced out last week  Inside Higher Ed 

Colleges are upending majors  Axios 

Faced with high costs, crowding and confusion, college students struggle to earn a degree in four years   Union Tribune 

U. of Tulsa Has a Billion-Dollar Endowment for Just 4,000 Students: Why Is It Cutting Programs? Tulsa World 

"Predatory" company uses Canadian universities to sell shoddy conferences  Ottawa Citizen

The Rise of the Mega-University  The Chronicle of Higher Education

Students Are Protesting Mike Pence's Commencement Speech At This Christian University  Newsweek 

Students at Mormon-owned BYU urge honor code compassion  Associated Press

After catholic university students vote to ban porn on campus wifi, nonprofit renews call for Notre Dame to follow  Newsweek

***STUDENT MEDIA  

Administrators censor High School newspaper, demanding the name of a confidential source and moving to prior restraint  Dynamics of Writing 

Police are investigating trashed student newspapers  Student Press Law Center 

***STUDENT LIFE 

The most consequential, and least informed, decision that college students make  New York Times 

Group Instagram accounts for incoming freshman are a way to make friends, find roommates, and suss out colleges before fall  The Atlantic

The Texas State student senate voted to bar a conservative group  Texas Tribune 

Nearly half of indebted millennials say college wasn't worth it, and the reason why is obvious  Business Insider

My Daughter Died By Suicide After Being Abused at College  Vice  

A cartographic clash between the LSE and its Chinese students  Economist 

Fewer than 25% of college graduates can answer 4 simple money questions correctly  Market Watch 

Video shows campus safety officers pin black Columbia University student down when he refuses to show his ID  WPIX-TV

***TEACHING

Broadcast training boss warns of 'gradual erosion' of social skills as journalism students grow up messaging online  Press Gazette  

In praise of teachers (opinion)  The Week  

Five Lessons Online Faculty Can Learn from the IRS  Faculty Focus  

***ACADEMIC LIFE 

3 Things a Faculty-Pay Survey Shows About Academic Jobs  The Chronicle of Higher Education

Kentucky Prof is under investigation for misconduct  Retraction Watch   

The Rise of the Pedantic Professor When academic self-regard becomes an intellectual style   The Chronicle of Higher Education 

‘This Was a Hell Not Unlike Anything Dante Conjured.’ Readers Share Their Stories of Fraught Academic Careers Chronicle of Higher Ed