William Stobb

Are we dumber?  It's a question we're asking ourselves all the time now.  I encountered the query most recently in an episode of Californication , when struggling novelist Hank Moody (David Duchovny) laments the deterioration of the English language represented by such acronyms as LOL, BRB and even BJ.  I'm not a big fan of language policing, and I tend not to worry about the surface manifestations of linguistic evolution.  But the episode got me thinking about the larger question, again: despite the various acoutrements of "developed" economies, are we actually less advanced than previous generations?  Are "advancements" really regressions?  Are we dumber? Midwestern Americans of my generation arrived just a little too late to have much say in this debate.  By the time we matured, we were reacting.  Corporate farming had overtaken the family farm ideal.  Our parents had moved into town, gotten ...

As Associate Editor of the best literary magazine out there, Conduit , I am frequently met at my front door by a box of poetry and fiction submissions.  It is my job to fairly ruthlessly cut a box of a hundred or so submissions down to the best ten or twenty, and then pass them up the editorial chain of command.  This process is meaningful to me in myriad ways, and I may, on occasion, use this blog as a space to work through observations that arise out of editing for Conduit .   Last week, I worked through a box of submisisons in four work sessions--reading about 25 submissions in each two-to-three-hour sitting.  I try to work quickly but carefully, to remain open to my own interests as I work, and to allow myself to pursue tangential energies as they arise.  For example, I often find people's cover letters interesting, and I might take a moment to look up the website of a writer w...

Charlie Sheen is "winning."  So too is Republican strategist Frank Luntz, whose new book about successfully packaging ideas in persuasive language is called Win .  Luntz is perhaps most famous for having engineered the phrase "death taxes" to raise republican ire over previously benign "estate taxes."  Well... maybe "climate change" instead of "global warming" is more famous.  In any case, Luntz is well known for his ability to frame concepts in inflammatory or understated ways, usually to the advantage of right-wing constituencies. I first learned about Luntz through Frontline 's great episode "The Persuaders."  In that program, we see how Luntz uses focus groups and technology to determine which language resonates most with people.  His methods were fascinating, and there's no arguing with the success of his concepts.  Today, Luntz was a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation , and I found his analyses both insight...