This Monday’s Link Roundup has a site that will thrill the Über Grammarian. If that’s you, don’t miss The Online Dictionary of Language Terminology. If you’re a Joan Didion fan, you’ll want to watch Joan Didion Reads From New Memoir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Directed by Griffin Dunne. My favorite this week is How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect. For personal historians it’s another reminder that the stories we record may have little to do with what actually took place.
- 6 Ways to Sell Without Selling Your Soul. “Sure, you want to build a successful business, but not if it means losing who you are. Somehow, someway, you have to figure out how to make money without abandoning your values, and yet a part of you wonders … Is that really possible? The answer: Yes.”
- The World Memory Project. “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has gathered millions of historical documents containing details about survivors and victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution during World War II. Ancestry.com has spent more than a decade creating advanced technological tools that have allowed billions of historical documents to become searchable online. Together, the two organizations have created the World Memory Project to allow the public to help make the records from the Museum searchable by name online for free.”
- Joan Didion Reads From New Memoir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Directed by Griffin Dunne. “A mere twenty months after Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, Didion’s only child, Quintana Roo Dunne, contracted pneumonia, lapsed into septic shock and passed away. She was only 39 years old. Didion grappled with the first death in her 2005 bestseller, The Year of Magical Thinking. Now, with her new memoir Blue Nights, she turns to her child’s passing, to a parent’s worst fear realized.”
- Framing a Creative Elevator Pitch. “The aim of an elevator pitch should not be to make a sale, get a job, or nab a sack full of money from a venture capitalist. Rather, it is to start a conversation. The ideal outcome of an elevator pitch is for the other person to look at her watch and say, “I’ve got a free hour. Let’s go have a coffee and talk about this.”
- A Woman Of Photos And Firsts, Ruth Gruber At 100. “At the age of 100, Ruth Gruber is responsible for a lot of firsts. When she was just 20, she became the youngest Ph.D. ever at the University of Cologne in Germany. She was the first photojournalist, much less female journalist, to travel to and cover both the Soviet Arctic and Siberian gulag. She documented Holocaust survivors and the plight of the ship, the Exodus 1947.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
- How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect. “Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives… But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction.”
- The Online Dictionary of Language Terminology. “The ODLT contains concise explanations of the words English speakers use to discuss language.” [Thanks to APH member Pattie Whitehouse for alerting me to this item.]
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This article was inspired by a personal history colleague of mine in Victoria. She wondered if I knew anyone who could fix an audio cassette that no longer seemed to work in her recorder. I confessed that I didn’t have any recommendations. So I got to thinking, “How difficult is it to repair an audio cassette?” I did some research. Then I took apart a cassette and amazingly put it back together again! It requires patience and a steady hand but it’s not an impossible job… 
