I Know Who Wins the Game of Thrones
But first, what is a game? The word grows more interesting as our world—and language itself—grow more “gamified.” The classic definition of a game—a set…
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The New Math is My Father’s Math
My father is an engineer. For a time, in the 1960s, he worked on the heat shield for the Apollo modules that took us to…
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Writing is a New Word
As I write in The Interactive Voice, words themselves are thesis statements. The lawyer Raphael Lemkin first developed and coined the term “genocide” in response…
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On the Significance of Days
When I was a kid, the calendar divided into average days and holidays. On holidays, there were presents and candy. Then the presents—and the holidays—lost…
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Prompts are the New Assignment
My family loves Harry Potter. Our oldest borrowed more books from her school library last year than anyone else in the building, but Hogwarts is…
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The Most Precise Word in the Dictionary
One of the ideas behind my writing course is that for every classic writing form—the sentence, the citation, the argument, the resume—there is a counterpart…
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The Big Picture is in Our Heads
We bought one of the girls a train for Christmas and it brought together a lot of ideas for me. First, it was no surprise…
