Word of Mouth

The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is the one-man play by Mike Daisey that runs for nine performances at the music hall loft in Portsmouth. Daisey was vilified by the media when news broke that Daisey had fabricated characters and scenes and portions of the story, which aired on This American Life. Daisey was then grilled by host Ira Glass and producer Brian Reed as part of an hour-long retraction, during which Daisey regretted airing the monologue as journalism, but denied that it wasn’t true.

Produced with Emma Ruddock

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EHarmony and LinkedIn passwords hacked…

Facebook's attempt at democracy...

Like so many fathers being celebrated this weekend, Lieutenant colonel Donald C Lundquist served his country in battle. In 1967, the army assigned Don as executive officer of a squadron protecting a jet fighter base at Chui Lai from the Vietcong. Don found a novel way to stay in touch with his wife Ruth and his young daughter, Jacqui, who were living with Ruth’s parents in Germany…Jacqui Lundquist doesn’t remember her father, but she came to know him through the more than 300 letters and hours of audio tapes recorded in his hooch in Chui Lai. 

We at Word of Mouth are always on the prowl for breakthrough technologies and other intriguing science news – a frequent source of new ideas and research is a website called Science-Daily, where we found an article called “Evil Eyebrows and Pointy Chin of a Cartoon Villain Make Our ‘Threat’ Instinct Kick in.”  The article was based on the work of Dr.

A sheriff’s office employee in Hampton Virginia alleges that in 2009 he was professionally de-friended after “liking” the Facebook page of his boss’s political opponent.  But in a wrongful termination suit that concluded earlier this year, a judge ruled the other way…saying that “merely ‘liking’ a Facebook is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection.”  Ken Paulson is President and CEO of the F

Part 1: Almost a Psychopath/Halden Prison

On Sunday, the Grammy award winning Muir String Quartet will perform at a benefit for Classical Music by the Sea in North Hampton. Proceeds will benefit The Classics for Kids Foundation, which helps to provide school music programs throughout the United States with quality stringed instruments. The benefit begins with an afternoon reception followed by the concert at 6.

Earlier this week, we talked to our go-to internet guy about a switch to be flipped on a whole new version of the internet. Yesterday was World IPV6 Day, and as tech decoder Rob Fleischman explained, converting to the new web protocol was designed to solve the impending problem of the internet running out of IP addresses…those are the numerical codes designating the addresses of websites, pages, computers and hardware on networks. Well, Wednesday passed…the conversion happened…and our computers are still working.

Produced with Emma Ruddock

The worst line of defense… in times of war, military strategists will toy with any hair-brained scheme that could help win the day – just the sort of desperate thinking that has led to some of the most bizarre and dysfunctional weaponry in the history of battle. Mental Floss contributor Judy Dutton compiled a list of ridiculous martial blunders in her article “9 Weapons that Failed Spectacularly, and One that Possibly Didn’t”.

Prolonged protests over student tuition hikes came to a head late last month in Quebec, when more than 500 demonstrators were arrested in a single night. Protestors have twice paralyzed Montreal’s subway system, and vandalized buildings. US coverage of the quebec protests has been scant.

If If fiction writers can learn from police reports, true crime writers have the tricky task of transforming those reports into prose. Word of Mouth Senior Producer Rebecca Lavoie is also a true crime author. She and her husband Kevin Flynn have written and published two books, in the genre.

However much he saw of the world, Ernest Hemingway’s economical style of writing is often referred to as the iceberg theory…meaning that only one-eighth of the story behind a narrative needs to be above water.  We were reminded of this when we found the article "The Art of the Police Report" last year in the Writer’s Chronicle. The article drew lessons for crafting powerful prose from police reports filed by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

In the words of author Stephen Amidon, “no other figure is the focus of so much passion, controversy, expectation, and disappointment…” regardless of whether it is football or soccer, figure-skating or hockey, watching the world’s top athletes borders on hypnotic… and sometimes stands as proof of our ability to exceed physical human limitations and become something like the gods.