Christopher Nolan is teaming up with Homer on the best action story of the last 3,000 years. Read about it at Kottke. (Illustration mine).
Christopher Nolan is known for directing some of our most important films like Tenet, Inception, Interstellar, Oppenheimer and a bunch of Batmans. I couldn’t hink of a better match. Out mid-2026.
Nowhere better can you find the nuances of culture than in the words that are used. Nancy Friedman tracks those at Fritinancy. This year we get a bonus, wordS, not just word.
My favorite: The Fall of the Broman Empire, on the X-odus of people from Musk’s vanity website. Others include 4B (from Korea), Debank, social tonic (laced with THC), Pretendians. I have a couple of young HENRYs in my family tree. And there is the Hawk Tuah girl.
I can tell Nancy has been around a while at this game because she is writing on TypePad, a platform that had its heyday many years ago.
As a slow learner of written Japanese I am at Wanikani Level 20/60 after about a year. I like to check out how others are going about it. So I create a feed for Reddit’s LearnJapanese. Here is someone who finished up all 60 levels of Wanikani (a kanji learning program, $100 off this week for a lifetime license) after only a year and a half, and has now gone beyond Wanikani for a year.
Another interesting student is a German software developer and how he approaches the language.
From that we can learn about new tools. An old one that has been updated recently is Yomitan, whose browser extension allows you to research meaning, readings, and more while on the web. Another new one for me is the jpdb, a database of kanji you can customize to a great extent.
Huge (600 pp) trove of research on children’s (toddler to adolescent) use of digital screens. Open Source (free to download) too. From Springer. Handbook of Children on Screens.
From the BBS, many with short video clips, and most short and simple enough to be used in ELT classes.