First the dogs ate our work,
but I did not speak up because I did not have a dog.
Then floppy disk failures ate our work,
but I did not speak up because I kept a spare.
Then social networks ate our work,
and I knew we were in serious trouble.
Twitter Wit is not the first book of little things; it is another crowd-sourced cousin to the likes of The Truth About Chuck Norris and the Six-Word Memoirs series. There must be an almost irresistible urge to collect a bunch of small things and make a big thing, like stacking the sugar packets at the diner to make a sweet, delectable pyramid.
The longest single continuous piece of writing in the book is the foreword by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. It is a nice and safe and not unpleasant bit of writing, though both it and the introduction (yes, a foreword and an introduction) by Nick Douglas are not mind-blowing essays. They merely give the underlying rationale for the book and why people should take it seriously, which I interpret as—
Brevity is the soul of wit. People are funny, and they are funny on Twitter, perhaps uniquely so, because people who are probably not funny all the time feel compelled to up their game instead of contributing to our collective societal preoccupation with ourselves and anyone, anyone, can be a comic genius for a ‘tweet’ or two (if they write enough of them). Or, at least if you’re going to contribute to our downfall-by-breakfast-menu, be good at it.
Does this book succeed? In its quest to highlight amusing things, clever puns, and wry, sharp-witted observations—yes. In its quest to show that the one-liner is a classic form that continues to thrive—also yes. Are these really the funniest tweets on Twitter? Assuredly not, but they are clearly hand-selected and reflect the editor’s taste as to his favorites. You can’t really ask for more from an anthology.
What this book does not do (and may never have set out to do) is create a cohesive “book” experience. Twitter Wit is a collection of funny tweets, organized according to some rubric that I can’t guess (perhaps at random). Some tweets are clever puns with no real staying power. Some are cutting observations that really make a point. Some are funny miniature stories. Some I don’t even really get. Quality, style, significance all vary wildly. Everything is lumped together.
You could easily read Twitter Wit from cover to cover in one sitting, but the individual pieces would mostly blur together, and you likely wouldn’t even appreciate the best of them by the end. Your mind would be numb. Anyone can read one story for an hour or two. But can you read 300 smaller stories in an hour? You shouldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to you or to them.
This is a bathroom reader. This book begs to be read a page or two at a time and then put down. Appreciate the thought that went into the entries. Anything this short seems easy. When you read too much you absorb too little, and soon you’re just reading sentences.
It is, in the end, an amusing read. No matter what the topic—from humor to literature and anything in between—Twitter contains thoughtful, concise bits of writing that are worth reading. A book like Twitter Wit is essential as an Exercise in separating the wheat from the chaff, attenuating the noise, and providing a filter to show the otherwise uninvolved that interesting things are going here.
No matter how much money you spend on books, every medical student needs to do a ton of practice questions for the USMLE Step 1. Questions are an excellent way to learn the useful tip-offs and keywords, and—depending on the source—get a better feel for the board format. They’re also a form of active learning, unlike trying to self-induce a coma with the universally-utilized First Aid for the USMLE Step 1
For question books, post-Step MS3s and your local used book store are always good resources to buy study materials on the cheap. But free is better, and the internet is undeniably convenient and portable. I scoured the web to find free question banks online (updated June 2019):
- The NBME offers its own small set of free practice materials for the Steps 1, 2, and 3. You see the most recent set here, which includes a browser-based software version that mirrors the actual program Step uses (Fred V2), a tutorial, and 100+ question practice test. A must do. A pdf file is also available from the above link, which contains the same questions for your offline viewing pleasure. I’ve written answers/explanations to the past several sets, which are linked here.
- Lecturio has made their 2200 question USMLE question bank completely free after registering for a free account. If you’re interested in buying their full-featured video lecture/qbank product, you can get a 25% discount with code hpG6C.
- Pastest is a 2300-question commercial qbank that has a 48-hour free trial.
- WikiDoc has a 696 question board-style USMLE Step 1 qbank. Robust, very nice. Qbank appearance approximates the USMLE Fred software. Totally free but requires a login.
- MedBullets has a 1000+ question Step 1 qbank in clinical vignette style. Registration required, pretty robust software (tutor mode, tracks prior questions, etc).
- USMLE Sapphire is a free online qbank (registration required), currently with 520 questions. Style is more concise/abbreviated/clinical-flashcardy than the real clinical vignettes and the software handles the explanations in an annoying way, but the site keeps your test history, lets you review prior answers (no tutor mode), and pick questions based on subject and body system. Some of the bits I saw were a bit obscure, particularly given its size.
- Osmosis is a completely free big (>5000 question) qbank and video product. Many questions are more on the Step 2 side of things, but an impressive collection nonetheless.
USMLEQuickPrepis a large (~4500 questions) and entirely free qbank. It’s the largest and most exhaustive free source out there. The questions are a mixed bag, and not all are in Step-style, but most have explanations, the site isn’t too clunky, and it certainly stands out for its sheer volume.[site is down again]Lippincott’s 350-Question Practice Test for USMLE Step 1 is solid, but you must register (for free) before using it.[now defunct]- MedMaster (makers of the “made ridiculously simple” series) has a USMLE Step 1 qbank (among others). The questions are not step-style but rather content review. It’s a good foundational accompaniment to book learning, as it clearly highlights key facts and distinctions that are crucial for Step 1, but it does not prepare you for the exam proper. There are also no puns or goofy diagrams like the book series.
- Test Prep Review has a USMLE practice self-assessment section. There are 20 modules of 20 questions for 400 questions. They’re mainly fact-recall and not vignette-based, but it’s easy to use and accessible.
- Wiki Test Prep [now defunct, but with questions available as a pdf for download]
iswas a student-written qbank with over 900 questions with explanations.The site is great, and you can browse questions by keyword, flag questions, and create your own tests. It also lets you know what percentage of students answer the question correctly, which is interesting. The questions are in clinical-vignette board format. - MDLexicon has a bunch of vignette questions organized by category, it’s hard to tell exactly how many. The site design is bit odd, but it works.
- 4tests.com hosts an old 60-question Kaplan diagnostic exam. Answers can be exposed during the test if desired and do contain explanations. (Mom MD also has the identical sampler, only organized in six 10-question pages with answers directly below questions)
- ValueMD has a large question bank divided up by subject. The site also requires a free registration. The questions are straightforward fact-recall type and the site itself is clunky and hideous, but it’s still decent review.
- Kaplan
lets you try one 48-question section for free after signing up.
- Learntheheart.com has 50 cardiology USMLE Step 1 questions, with plans to add more.
Enjoy. I can’t vouch for the quality of these resources, but WikiDoc, Lecturio, MedBullets, Sapphire, and Wiki Test Prep together are about 3500 questions, bigger than UW (though assuredly with lots of overlap between sources). Osmosis, a new free player, adds in a lot as well. Add in the past few years of official practice questions (the “Free 150”) and you’ve got even more.
There are also several free questions sources for the MRCP (The UK’s version of the Step), for which there is considerable overlap:
- Confidence (3500 questions)
- ReviseMRCP
- MRCP Study
(For more information on how I personally would recommend studying, feel free to peruse my post: How to Approach the USMLE Step 1. You can also find my compilation of free study resources for the basic sciences here.)
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that my very first words published in print are in the form of a “tweet” I posted on Twitter on April Fool’s Day this year.
This particular savory morsel of bite-sized brilliance is in Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less, a brand new book from HarperCollins filled with several hundred very clever, witty, and pithy tweets. It is the very first Twitter-based book from a major publisher (of many to come, I’m sure). While my contribution (on page 73) only takes up roughly .15% of its content, its very inclusion proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that I must be one of the most interesting people on Twitter.
My short piece “The Presentation of the Virgin” is now up at Thirty First Bird Review (scroll down a bit), a site with a focus on cultural/religious interplay. It’s an old piece, and I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for it—it’s based off this wonderful painting by the fifteenth-century Italian artist/monk/engineer Fra Carnevale.
As a boring, quiet tale about a man loitering around The Temple staring at the Virgin Mary, it’s not the kind of thing one tends to see published in the online literary scene, which more often feautres contemporary tales of relatively unhappy regular people (you know, people just like you and me) doing unhappy and probably damaging things to themselves either physically or mentally, usually told in first person with a forceful, energetic writing style. But hey, it’s short—so read it anyway.
Robert Swartwood is a man after my own heart: a lover of the incredibly short-form. Earlier this year he coined the term “Hint Fiction” to mean “a story of 25 words or less that suggests a larger, more complex story.” Then he got a book deal from W.W. Norton to edit an anthology. Boom, like lightning.
When I first read about hint fiction (and some of its examples), I already had a very similar take on my ideal nano story. I completely agree with the definition quoted above as a basis for good short stuff (and I work from a very similar angle in choosing stories for Nanoism). But for some reason, in my experience (and especially in reading submissions for his original contest), many hint/nano stories are a not standalone stories at all but rather some kind of movie tag-line/newspaper headline that alludes to a story. They’re much more compelling if you imagine the guy from the movie previews reading them (though, really, wouldn’t that be true for everything?). If you read one of the various “six word story” outlets, you’ll see an even more extreme version of what I mean. Entertaining—yes. Standalone—yes. Story? Debatable.
I’m not the kind of person who says a story can’t be short, obviously. But in my reading, it should have some self contained action. The beginning, middle, end definition is not particularly useful. Nor is the conflict, climax, resolution triad. In nanofiction, these elements are often implied in a word or phrase (hinted at, so to speak). Given the length, it’s unavoidable. For “story”-judgment, I tend to ascribe to the idea of “change.” There must be some fundamental change for the character, however slight, from onset to ending. And to really hit home, the greater story must be hinted at. Leaving it out for the reader to make up is not hinting—it’s omission, and they are not the same thing.
One person killing another person with nothing else is not a story (but it is by far the most common theme I see). The author needs to give the reader some help in deciphering a greater narrative arc. There is a level of necessary vagueness to the form, but just tossing a scene out in 25 words does not a story make. All scene and no story is not good. All plot and no scene is also not good—it’s not supposed to be a synopsis, after all. You need both.
Submissions to the Hint Fiction anthology are open until the end of the month. While Mr Swartwood has already received over a 1000 entries and will publish probably no more than 150, perhaps your submission could net you $25 delicious dollars and an excuse to say, “Oh, why yes, I was published by Norton.”
Thaumatrope: the first (and first paying) twitterzine (@thaumatrope), a twitter-based publication for microfiction. It is an idea that may almost seem frivolous to the uninitiated—stories in 140 characters? Why bother? What can you really say in around 20 words? Literary merits aside—with Twitter as a backdrop, would anyone argue that an intriguing or witty tweet-story is less engaging than someone’s personal struggle with productivity or the details of their latest bowel movement? Just kidding, I think Twitter is pretty neat. Anyway…
Thaumatrope also remains the most innovative of the twiction-pushers, including a unique program (the Thaumatrope Fiction Relocation Project) to include its fiction on the programs of conventions worldwide (really cool) and a special theme month with multi-award-winning guest editor Sean Wallace: Twitterpunk, a series of stories in celebration of cyberpunk and its related subgenres (steampunk, biopunk, et al.). I was honored to have my story (probably coincidentally) kick off #twtrpunk this past weekend (click the link in Sean’s intro tweet to read the actual story).
While “-punk” themed stories of this length may be an homage that only fans of the genre will appreciate, nanofiction in general has a much broader appeal, at least for those of us with a few seconds to spare in between not doing work by reading the news and not doing work by playing addictive flash games. If nothing else, perhaps someone should go edit the “cyberpunk derivatives” article on Wikipedia and add “twitterpunk” to the list.
I have an edgy, mildly graphic piece in the new issue of SUB-LIT (“publishing the best in literary dissidence”), a site that specializes in awesome pieces that should (and do) have the tagline, Sex, Literature, and Rock & Roll.
I actually wrote “The Woman on the Sidewalk” over two years ago only to let it burn an erotic hole in my hard drive until I ran across SUB-LIT, at which point I metaphorically dusted it off and sent it out. I owe a big thank you to head editor Laurah Raines for working with me on this to make it even more awesome. Go read what my workshop professor might have called “an excellent, energetic tale about the effects of our hypersexualized society.”
One of the internet’s double edged swords: a lot of information is good, but the consequent ton of poorly researched and incorrect information is bad. Even lay people who want to be up-to-date on science must swim through the well-intentioned mistakes of their sources. Take, for example, this article: “Blindspot shows brain rewiring in an instant.”
The title and thrust of the article is that because we don’t notice our blind spot (the spot where there are no photoreceptors due to the optic nerve) even when deprived of input from the other eye, we must re-wire our brains instantaneously to compensate. “Re-wire” is in fact a horrible way to explain this phenomenon.
In order to produce our visual experience when deprived of input from both eyes, our brains utilize pathways that already exist—a sort of backup circuit. “Re-wire” implies that there the utilized pathway is new.
When the conductor of a train sees a problem ahead on the track and switches over at the next junction, he’s not building a new path. The other path has always been there, he’s just utilizing it in a situation when he otherwise might not.
Scientists have known for some time that the brain has alternate circuits for a variety of sensory modalities (think of “blindsight” for example). The fact that our brains can utilize our natural development and genetic predispositions to create this intricate machinery is incredible. The fact that our brains can cope with unexpected stimuli almost instantaneously is also amazing. But, let’s be clear: re-wiring—also known as learning—takes time. Contrary to the article’s implication, this study says nothing to the contrary.
Novels take time to write. What better way to catalog the essence of a story than by writing only the first and the last sentence? First and Last Sentence Magazine publishes just that: novels that don’t really exist by fictional authors offering up stories like mystery-meat sandwiches. Interesting premise. My offering, “The Gates of Leaven,” appeared today.