In Praise of Chick Lit: The Genre’s All-Stars Talk to Vanity Fair “As The Devil Wears Prada 2 dominates, it’s time to give these best-selling, much-maligned books about single women in the big city their due—with help from Plum Sykes and Jennifer Weiner.” I don’t like the term chick lit; nonetheless, I’ll have to live […]
This month’s stating point is Virginia Evans’s epistolary novel, The Correspondent. In this novel we get to know Sybil Van Antwerp from her 73rd birthday until her death about 10 years later. first degree One of the people to whom Sybil writes is author Joan Didion. In an example of synchronicity, the book I read
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A man awakens with no memory of who he is, where he is, or why he’s here. He’s being ministered to by robotic arms apparently controlled by a computer that keeps asking, “What is your name?” As flashes of memory play out in his mind, he struggles to remember. He asks questions, but all the
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Reading to young kids improves their social skills − and a new study shows it doesn’t matter whether parents stop to ask questions Interested in developing empathy and creativity in her school-age children, Erin Clabough, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, compared two methods of reading aloud to children: (1) reading straight
We’re All Reading Wrong “To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud.” Journalist Alexandra Moe informs us “Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud.” She continues: “To reap the full benefits of
Seven Books to Read When You Have No Time to Read “When life gets really hectic, sitting quietly with a book can feel like an impossible luxury,” writes Bekah Waalkes. “What works best for me, though, is choosing just the right book.” Here she suggests some books “representing varied genres” that you might “actually want to
This March we start with a classic in celebration of its being made into a new film – Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. first degree A much more recent book that focuses on the next generation left to deal with its family’s mess (some things never change) is The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell. second
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Text Is (Still) King “Why the written word will never die.” Psychologist Adam Mastroianni argues that all the current narratives about the decline of reading and the related decline of civilization itself “tend to leave out some inconvenient data points.” He concludes that “humans have a hunger that no video can satisfy. Even in the
The existential balm of seeing yourself as a verb, not a noun Clinical psychologist Eric Jannazzo discusses the realization that he “could start to imagine my personhood not as a thing but as a roiling together of body and breath, memory and mood, ceaselessly shifting thoughts and perceptions, all braiding with the rest of the
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Is AI hurting your ability to think? How to reclaim your brain Noel Carroll, an associate professor in Business Information Systems at the University of Galway, warns that “many people may be falling victim to the same phenomenon – outsourcing the ‘struggle’ of thinking to AI.” He calls this condition “cognitive atrophy.” Essentially, AI is
