The sci-fi of another language
The meaning of science fiction stories are often tough to pin down. Do they depict the future or the present? Are they personal or political? Imaginative or reality-based? Also, is…
Mmm by Michele Oberholtzer
Listen — one day, a woman and a man lay together. They pushed and pulled and pulsed against each other’s bodies under the early afternoon sun. In that moment, when…
creativity, the illusion of originality, and when is something really plagiarism
I happened to listen to these two podcast back to back and I think they are actually great companion episodes. They are about creativity, the illusion of originality, and when…
Jennifer Kronovet studied Yiddish so she could communicate with the dead
Kronovet had a ton of ideas for language-related podcast episodes. We eventually settled on her adventures with Yiddish. She shared these adventures with two other students of the language, Faith Jones and Samuel…
Allusionist 65. Eponyms III: Who’s That Guy?
So It turns out calling a person guy or saying “you guys” comes from Guy Fawkes.
Is there an art to dubbing movies and TV? Yes, and Germans have mastered it.
It turns out that there are plenty of reasons why dubbing became a thing in Germany while other European countries took the subtitling route. Inevitably perhaps, the story includes Nazis, Communists and…
How Writing Closed Captions Turned Me off TV For Good
Post-MFA, a writer spends time in the captioning trenches
The Voynich Manuscript and Truth on the Internet
It can be a little frightening for medievalists to see self-evidently wrongheaded interpretations spread like wood lice.
Technobabble
UK podcast star Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist helps me figure out why one set of poorly understood pseudo-scientific terms can sink a scene, while another set can make a…