Innovative narrative game Dialogue: A Writer’s Story out now
Studio co-founder and designer of Dialogue, Dustin Connor, added: “Conversation can be different depending on the context and participants, and we wanted to craft different visuals and mechanics for different conversations to reflect that. Some are timed and ‘in the moment’, while others are exploratory. Our game is a starting point – we want to see other developers experiment with their own conversation mechanics, and we want to lend our experience as consultants to make that process easier.”
‘The Death of Expertise’ Explores How Ignorance Became a Virtue
The inimitable Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times reviews Tom Nichols’s book on a “wave of anti-rationalism that has been accelerating for years — manifested in the growing ascendance of emotion over reason in public debates, the blurring of lines among fact and opinion and lies, and denialism in the face of scientific findings about climate change and vaccination.”
Mental-health therapists see uptick in patients struggling with post-election anxiety
From The Seattle Times:
With the constant bombardment of information coming out of the Trump administration, local mental-health experts say a hefty number of their existing clients — and as many as 80 percent of potential new clients — are seeking help for postelection distress.
And this has been an equal-opportunity occurrence: “anxiety has been on the rise among people of all political leanings, therapists say.”
The Brief, Confusing History of Foam Packaging
I did not know that everything we think is Styrofoam actually isn’t:
We know that polystyrene is bad for the environment, that it’s frequently mistaken for Styrofoam, and that it’s kind of a crappy way of shipping food to people.
UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it
University of Washington professor Kate Starbird works in the field of crisis informatics. After the Boston Marathon bombing she began looking at social media postings to see how those media might be used for the public good in crises. Unexpectedly, she found clusters of fringe conspiracy theories, what she calls “real tinfoil-hat stuff.”
Read about her findings in an article that seems especially pertinent in light of the current political current in the U.S.
© 2017 by Mary Daniels Brown