People Are Trying to ‘Deprogram’ Their MAGA Parents Through Book Clubs
“Divisive politics have led people to go “no contact” with their right-wing parents. Some hope reading together could help bridge the gap.”
A report from Wired.
The Psychology Of Suspense: Why Are Thrillers So Addicting?
I’m fond of thrillers, although I never thought to try to explain to myself why. This article addresses the questions of what makes suspense so suspenseful:
The allure of suspense taps into our most primal instincts: fear, excitement, the search for answers, and the thrill of resolution. We love gripping tales because they draw us into haunting new realms and invite us to reckon with the darkness from the safety of home.
Chinese literature is tough to find in English. One editor hopes to change that
NPR reports of “a new effort from Riverhead Books, led by editor Han Zhang, to publish more translated Chinese language literature. Zhang is hoping to expose American readers to a broader idea of Chinese literary fiction.” The emphasis of this publishing effort is to provide “small looks into contemporary Chinese life.”
Actually, Goodreads Is Good
Angelina Mazza acknowledges all the often reported problems with Goodreads and its participants. She goes so far as calling it an “ugly, broken website.” Yet, she counters, “it might be the best website.”
Read her reasons for saying so. Do you agree with her?
Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the ‘Antithesis of Wikipedia’
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, thinks the internet’s default encyclopedia and one of the world’s biggest repositories of information could benefit from some applications of AI. The volunteer editors who keep Wikipedia functioning strongly disagree with him.
A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In.
“More people are turning to general-purpose chatbots for emotional support. At first, Adam Raine, 16, used ChatGPT for schoolwork, but then he started discussing plans to end his life.”
From The New York Times.
Technology reporter Kashmir Hill traveled to California to interview the people who knew Adam Raine, the 16-year-old who died in April and “had been discussing ending his life with ChatGPT for months.”
Here’s Obama’s 2025 Summer Reading List
As August ended, President Obama released the list of books he “read and loved over the summer.” The list includes both fiction and nonfiction.
College students are bombarded by misinformation, so this professor taught them fact-checking 101 − here’s what happened
Sam Wineburg Emeritus Professor of Education at Stanford University, discusses the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum developed by a research group he formerly led at Stanford: “The curriculum, which is freely available to anyone, teaches a set of strategies based on how professional fact-checkers evaluate online information.”
Wineberg discusses how the basics of this curriculum can be adapted for various content areas and how several professors have employed the basic components of the curriculum with positive results.
Criticism Is Literature. Why Is It Vanishing?
“What do the best book reviews do? What is the current state of the critical ecosystem? Chicago Review of Books founder Adam Morgan takes stock of book reviewing in the US.”
[the] dichotomy between authors and critics is false. A great book review can be just as rich, entertaining, and insightful as a great short story. Criticism is literature—a mercurial species of creative nonfiction that fills the shape of its container.
I’ve always thought of writing about books as efforts in creative criticism—what I’m writing is nonfiction, but it can be as thoughtfully creative as the literary work it’s discussing. Adam Morgan points out here that most general-interest publications have either severely cut back on or discontinued altogether their book reviewing.
“But what makes a good review good?” Morgan asks. To answer this question, he tells us, “I kept searching for craft advice until I struck gold: John Updike’s six rules for literary criticism from the introduction to his 1975 essay collection, Picked-Up Pieces.” Morgan quotes all six rules here, and they provide reasonable guidelines.
Morgan goes on to address what he calls “every critic’s two highest hurdles: how to begin a review, and how to end one.” To Updike’s six rules he adds four of his own. Taken together, these ten rules (though they’re really more guidelines than hard-and-fast rules; that’s where the creativity comes in) offer a framework for book discussions.
The Real Luxuries in Life Aren’t Found in Material Things
“Explore how ‘tsundoku’ redefines luxury as the joy of unread books and the freedom to read slowly, with purpose.”
Vincent Phan writes, “In a world focused on status and material goods, true wealth may come from non-material luxuries like time, peace, and personal growth.”
Cue here all the jokes about book hoarders, e.g., “I don’t have enough books because I don’t have THESE books.” Instead, think of all your as-yet-unread books as tsundoku, the Japanese term for collecting books and not [yet] reading them. The difference between hoarding and tsundoku is intention:
One who collects books has done so with the intention to read them, the intention to nourish their souls, learn more, and heal. The collection is accidental, and although the books may pile up, they have all been chosen to nourish and feed that inherent thing inside of us that yearns for wisdom.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
