Happy Memorial Day Weekend, ProfHackers! Before we launch into the Weekend Reading, we wanted to take a moment a remember those who have served our country both at home and abroad. Thank you for your service and your sacrifice.
Laura Miller, writer for Salon.com has broken up with Amazon. Citing the online everything seller’s increasingly monopolistic tactics, she points to the recent scuffle with Hachette books, reported by the New York Times, where Amazon has delayed shipment of certain Hachette titles and offered customers “similar items for less” in banner ads across the pages of others. If you don’t have a local independent bookstore to patronize, you might consider buying online from other sellers like Powells.com or Biblio.com.
The Atlantic ran a story earlier this week about trigger warnings on college syllabi, which set my Facebook and Twitter timelines wall aflutter. The Atlantic piece was a response to “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm,” which ran in The New York Times a week earlier, and The New Yorker recently posted a follow-up, “Trigger Warnings and the Novelist’s Mind.”
Apparently, there was a time when people believed that chess wold destroy civilized society and incite a moral panic. Yes, you read that correctly: chess. Clive Thompson writes about this in The Message.
We ProfHackers like our apps. This is not news, but BGR alerts us to six very cool apps that are currently free (for a limited time): Thinglist, Work Time, Analog Film, and three others. I have downloaded most of these though I’ve not yet gotten to try them out.
Lastly, with summer comes visits to the pool, the beach, the lake, etc. Here is an important piece to read if you are planning to be anywhere near a body of water in which people like to swim: “Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning” from Slate.com.
Have a happy Memorial Day weekend everyone! Our video of the week is from Jimmy Fallon’s lip synch competition series featuring Stephen Merchant and Joseph Gordon Levitt. Watch all the way to the end to see Levitt take on Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass":
[Creative Commons licensed image “Remember” by Flickr user Ian Sane]
