You have multiple ‘social identities’ – here’s how to manage them
“When it comes to our membership of different social groups, most of us switch between different versions of ourselves multiple times each day,” writes Anna K. Zinn, Ph.D., of the University of Queensland, in Australia. Identity is the key component of Life Stories in Literature. Understanding how we all have multiple social identities that we shift among many times a day enables us to recognize and understand the lives of fictional characters. And understanding the psychology of fictional characters can, in turn, help us empathize with other people in our lives. In this mutually supportive way, reading can help us become better people.
Five Books for People Who Really Love Books
“These five titles focus on the many connections we can form with what we read.”
Writer Elisa Gabbert understands the relationships between writers, readers, and the books they share. Here she recommends five books that “take all kinds of forms (essay, novel, memoir) and focus on the many connections we can form with what we read.”
Same River, Same Man
I put this week’s list of literary links together before we left for vacation, when I’d be gone for a month, so that I’d have something to write about a few days after we returned home. So I don’t remember whether it was by intention or by pure serendipity that the previous entry and this one are by the same writer. In this excerpt from her most recent book, Any Person Is the Only One, Elisa Gabbert discusses the process of rereading books that impressed her as an adolescent:
First readings are when I pay the most attention, do the most doubling back. They’re when I have the most capacity for shock and joy. When I reread I am always comparing my experience to my first impression, a constant distraction; I am tempted to skip and skim, to get along with it and verify my memories already, my belief that I already know what I think. You can reread ad infinitum, but you can only read something for the first time once.
AI as Self-Erasure
“Humanity’s will to disappear is being installed in the omni-operating system.”
Matthew B. Crawford, a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, examines philosophically how the spread of artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to erase our individuality by absorbing our uniqueness into the concept of “a general Public, [in which] there is no complementarity between us, no differentiation and dependence, but instead a colorless cohesion of interchangeable, autonomous subjects.”
Why Is Depression Sometimes Called “The Black Dog”?
Michael Thomas Kincella takes a mythological and historical look as the phrase the black dog as a metaphor for depression.
Has the DEI Backlash Come for Publishing?
“A new study reveals positive changes since 2020. But can they last?”
Dan Sinykin and Richard Jean So acknowledge the advances in diversity of the publishing industry since 2020, but “we reckon with what appears now to be the beginning of their reversal—and contemplate what can be done to avoid a seemingly inevitable cycle of retrenchment following any progress.”
Magic Died When Art and Science Split
Renée Bergland, professor of literature and creative writing at Simmons University in Boston, discusses her three greatest revelations while researching and writing her recent book Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science.
Bergland observes that “Darwin, the great scientist, and Dickinson, the great poet, witnessed the separation of science from art, but they did not accept it for themselves. They resisted disenchantment.” She follows sociologist Max Weber’s definition of disenchantment as “the belief that everything in the natural world can be known and mastered and that mystery, wonder, and other emotions have no place in scientific thought.” She concludes, “In our current moment of cascading environmental crises, we need to work together to rediscover the natural magic that enlivens our world.”
Julia Phillips on the Writing Lessons of Fairy Tales
“You can write a brutal ending to your story,” writes Julia Phillips, because the narrative lesson fairy tales teach us is that readers’ enjoyment comes from the sense of closure.
A love for thinking brings benefits way beyond school and work
“Having a passion for mental effort – a trait that’s distinct from being intelligent – has some wide-ranging upsides”
It annoys me when someone says overthinking like it’s a bad thing. I’m perhaps super-sensitive to this implication because when I was a child, my mother used to tell me, “You think too much,” which meant that I should keep quiet and do what she said.
“In everyday life, people can often choose how hard they want to flex their mental muscles. You might make that choice without even knowing what, exactly, motivates it,” writes Josephine Zerna, a postdoctoral researcher of cognitive-affective neuroscience at Dresden University of Technology in Germany. In this article she examines the human trait called “need for cognition” and how it affects our lives: “the sum of the evidence tells us that need for cognition is, overall, a very positive trait to have.”
And I’m fine with being someone who overthinks instead of someone who barely thinks at all.
© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown
