A Burning: Good Books Are Hard to Read

Stylistically speaking, A Burning is compulsively readable. It is told in short chapters, written in economic prose, alternating perspectives and foci on characters. Majumdar seems to be a skilled writer who knows our short attention spans intimately and recognizes the need to move briskly to appeal to our constraints.

An Elegy of a Piece: Review of Pico Iyers’ Falling Off The Map

The name alone is enticing enough. It is the neatly packaged moniker which perfectly hooks the reader – in this case, me – who might be interested. I pointed at it for the boy minding the store. He labored out of his seat, and seeing what I was pointing at, said: “Do you really want to see it? Are you going to buy it? It’s really stuck in there; will be hard to get out. Why do you want it anyway?”

Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?: Addaing with Noam Chomsky and the Illustration of Genius

The beauty of Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy is that Gondry is able to flesh out this Chomsky; though it must also be said that their conversations do talk about his biography and social beliefs. Yet the focus of the film is their conversation about language and how human beings might think, which Gondry illustrates in beautiful, little animation. Though not a linguist, academic, or philosopher, or because he is none of those things, Gondry is able to present a picture of Chomskyan linguistics and philosophy that is clear and subtlety thoughtful.

Hacking Composition: Rethinking Codeswitching in Writing Discourse

What is needed is critical literature that studies codeswitching in written discourse as thoroughly as that which has been developed for the oral forms of the phenomenon. The three books reviewed in this essay advance exactly such a project. The first book, Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing, illustrates language mixing in written discourse historically and in our contemporary time. The subsequent works, Language and Mobility and Translingual Practice, generate useful frames to discuss codeswitching as rhetorical practices of contact zones and how it can inform our pedagogy in writing classrooms. In developing these frames, the latter two books also articulate an abandonment of the term codeswitching and construct other labels for approaching this form of written practice.

Breaking Bad: A Reading

Well that was that! Breaking Bad is done, having set a path few shows will ever traverse again. It deserved its accolades too. The last episode was the best ending as you could have had with a show this good - it was a cultural phenomenon. This ending, no matter what the opinion on the matter, …