Wellsbaum.blog

Writing about life and arts

News

  • One too many chips

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    1 min read

    Continuous partial attention makes it too easy to snack. Instead of waiting for the main meal, we fritter our hunger away on too many chips and salsa. We’re full before the entree. Replace chips with social media, and you start to see the excess wear and tear we put on our bodies and minds. We…

  • A medium and its message

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    2 min read

    The medium is the format in which something works. The selection of media predetermines how content gets disseminated and shared. The Internet is a mass medium. Newspapers are a medium. TV, radio, podcasts, and books are also mediums. A medium is any messaging mechanism that connects people together to help facilitate communication. The medium is…

  • Angels with dirty faces

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    1 min read

    If you want to be more optimistic, close your Twitter account. Bad news is addicting. But don’t completely bury your head in the sand. No one acts in public like they do on social media. People say whatever they want online because they’re shielded behind a mobile screen. Go to the grocery and the sick-spitting…

  • Free the animals 🦁🐘🦓

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    1 min read

    The design for Animal crackers just got an update. Due to mounting pressure from animal rights group PETA, Nabisco removed the cages from its iconic cracker box. The updated version shows the animals roaming free. The redesign of the boxes, now on U.S. store shelves, retains the familiar red and yellow coloring and prominent “Barnum’s…

  • Coping with the cesspool of news

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    2 min read

    There’s a certain smugness people get in ignoring the news. Congratulations, you have no idea what’s going on! But I like to stay informed. I’d prefer Walden with Wi-Fi.  While most of the stories are flotsam, sometimes that one little insight can make the biggest impact on your train of thought. The trick is to stay…

  • “Real journalism matters”

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    1 min read

    The medium is the message. And while some of those media messages may stick, most lack substance. Look closely. “Real journalism matters.” Pics via Columbia Journalism Review. (h/t @nudd)

  • The world’s most expensive coffee is 💩☕

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    1 min read

    The world’s most expensive coffee (aka brown gold) is shit, literally. In other strange coffee news, scientists made a broccoli powder you can dump into your coffee. A broccoli latte sounds nutritious.

  • U.K. schools dismiss the traditional clock face

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    1 min read

    The U.K. is eliminating analog clocks from student classrooms because kids can’t read them. Says one professor from the Times Educational Supplement newspaper: “It is amazing the number of students I am coming across in year 10, 11 and in sixth form who do not know how to tell the time. We live in a…

  • Central Park to go car-free this summer

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    1 min read

    New York City’s mayor Bill De Blasio announced today that Central Park will be car-free starting this June. The artwork says it all: humans are hard-wired for nature.

  • Blame the humans, not the bots, for retweeting false news

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    2 min read

    According to research done by data scientists at MIT, it is humans, not bots, which disseminate false news. The study began with the 2013 Boston bombings when Twitter spread inaccurate rumors about the aftermath of the events. The three authors of the study then took it upon themselves to dig deeper into the fake news…

  • Coping with the maelstrom of news

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    1 min read

    It’s hard enough to cultivate awareness. We drown in our own ineptitude to sort and curate the noise. Spiraling out of control, we gravitate to the bite-sized headline. Lacking interest in context, we are too impatient to go deeper. Like fast food, we consume information and move on, having forgotten what crap we engulfed. The…