In The Sydney Morning Herald, David Free noted how many news publications have “started warning us how many minutes” it will take to get through a given article. “The implication is clear: Reading is a luxury we can barely afford,” he wrote. “The sooner a writer gets out of our hair, the better. But if we don’t want writers in our hair, they’ll never get into our heads.”
The above was part of an argument in favor of reading longer books, but it did remind me that the average reading speed for Americans is about 200 words per minute. I'm not sure I see the need to alert readers to how many minutes they should allot to any particular story but it can certainly help student journalists make decisions about how much space to give any particular coverage. The key question: how long can we expect our readers to stick with our coverage? Is this a 30-second story? Is this a four-minute piece? Then designers can start allocating available space.
In The Philadelphia Inquirer, David Murphy wrote: “Playoff baseball is like watching a loved one defuse a bomb. It is not something that you enjoy. It is something that you endure. Every pitch is a tick on a timer that is counting down to some unknown number, every swing a snip at a tangle of multicolored wires, any one of which is liable to make the season explode.”
I was thinking this is true for baseball, but it touched on how I feel lately about watching Iowa football or the Broncos. There hasn't been much enjoyment lately in watching either team, though there are certainly thrills and drama. Baseball playoffs may be worse because of the 162-game build up to the fleeting chance for glory, but am I really looking forward to watching the Broncos Monday night at the Chargers?
In The Boston Globe, Renée Graham quipped: “Herschel Walker could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and perform an abortion, and he wouldn’t lose any Republican voters.”
The above is a play on the famous Trump boast, and it relies on the reader immediately grasping the allusion and seeing that both Trump and this take feature hyperbole that may actually turn out to not be much of an exaggeration.
In New York magazine, Rebecca Traister added to the aptly oversize body of great descriptions of John Fetterman’s physique by writing that he “appeared to be built of all the XXL parts at the Guy Factory.”
Fetterman is running for senate in Pennsylvania and he is a big fella, almost always wearing shorts and sweatshirts and generally seeming to be quite a character... but a likeable one, at least for many "non-elite."
In The Washington Post, Sean Wilentz marveled at Donald Trump’s peculiar tenacity: “Zombielike, he swaggers and struts and cons on the world’s largest stage, much as he did when gossip columnists fawned over him as The Donald; and he will continue his night of the living dead, with menacing success, until someone finally drives a metaphorical stake through his metaphorical heart.”
This last one deserves a bit more analysis, mostly due to the mixing of spooky metaphors. The "living dead" are zombies, I presume, and they are not killed with stakes through the heart. That is the preferred way to dispatch vampires. On the other hand, most of us can at least sense the gist of the observation. Still, we might push students to come up with a better final phrase, like "...until someone shoots a metaphorical bullet into his metaphorical brain." Or should we shy away from gun violence references completely in favor of wooden stakes impaling bodies?
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