These are the stories from the internet that piqued my interest over the last week.
Why We Don’t Read, Revisited
Caleb Crain, in a follow-up to a decade-old report on Americans’ reading habits, reports that the time Americans spend reading continues to decline. “Television, rather than the Internet, likely remains the primary force distracting Americans from books.”
And, he points out, “The nation, after all, is now led by a man who doesn’t read.”
The Fairytale Language of the Brothers Grimm
How the Brothers Grimm went hunting for fairytales and accidentally changed the course of historical linguistics and kickstarted a new field of scholarship in folklore.
Truth, Lies, and Literature
Salman Rushdie ponders the role of truth in our disputatious time of unsupported pronouncements and declarations of fake news. How can literature help support current notions of what’s real and what isn’t?
when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. We can make people agree, in this time of radical disagreement, on the truths of the great constant, which is human nature. Let’s start from there.
Our Fiction Addiction: Why Humans Need Stories
A report on scholars “who are asking what exactly makes a good story, and the evolutionary reasons that certain narratives – from Homer’s Odyssey to Harry Potter – have such popular appeal.”
© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown
