The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait
The powers that be at Oxford University Press have chosen rage bait as their word of the year for 2025.
Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”.
Make Culture Weird Again
Lamenting the current state of cultural stagnation, cultural critic W. David Marx declares that “What’s missing now is a veneration of the artistic mindset, which possesses the imagination to reject kitsch—art that trades in well-worn formulas, stock emotions, and immediate comprehensibility—and pursue work that expands the possibilities of human perception.”
Writing builds resilience by changing your brain, helping you face everyday challenges
Emily Ronay Johnston, Assistant Teaching Professor of Global Arts, Media and Writing Studies at the University of California, Merced, explains the benefits of daily writing:
From dashing off a heated text message to composing an op-ed, writing allows you to, at once, name your pain and create distance from it. Writing can shift your mental state from overwhelm and despair to grounded clarity — a shift that reflects resilience.
Johnston explains a five-step process for building resilience through writing.
The Curious Notoriety of “Performative Reading”
“Is the term a new way of calling people pretentious, or does it reflect a deprioritization of the written word?”
Brady Brickner-Wood takes on “the practice of ‘performative reading,’ a concept that’s recently gained a curious notoriety”:
A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-“B” book.
Our AI, Ourselves?
“Recent novels reflect our own confusion about what makes us human.”
Novelist Jessi Jezewska Stevens discusses some recent novels that attempt “to redefine what it means to remain human in the face of technological and social revolution.”
“What do we want AI to do?, Stevens asks. “The answer to this question will inevitably influence how it is designed and trained.” For visions of how the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence might develop, Stevens looks at the following novels: Tokyo Sympathy Tower Japanese novelist Rie Qudan, The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami, and Playground by Richard Powers.
While literature cannot resolve the fact that we are each trapped within our own head, it does offer us brief glimpses into another’s. It remains one of the last venues for exploring, as Lalami asserts of dreams, human delinquency “with greater honesty than we would ever allow in our waking moments.” There is no better medium for investigating memories, associations, ambiguities, and delusions — investigations that ought not to be outsourced to AI, which claims to trade in authority and consensus-building truth.
Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?
“If only they were robotic! Instead, chatbots have developed a distinctive — and grating — voice.”
“A.I.-generated writing, once the distant echo of science-fiction daydreams, is now all around us — neatly packaged, fleetingly appreciated and endlessly recycled. . . . Yet there’s something unsettling about this voice,” writes Sam Kriss.
Read about the characteristics—such as the em dash—that Kriss says make AI-generated text so weird.
Hero Edit: On Literary Depictions of Reality TV
“When our society experiences a large shift, there’s usually a five- to ten-year lag before it begins to show up in our literature. . . . Reality television, by contrast, has taken over half a century to make its way into fiction,” writes journalist and fiction writer Hannah Berman. “If we look into the mirror that reality TV fiction holds up,” Berman concludes, “we will more often than not discover our own complicity.”
7 Literary Diaries That Illuminate the Lives of Great Writers
“These authors respond to tragedy, modernity, and overstimulation with mundane brilliance”
“Great diarists are, in my opinion, almost inevitably great writers in general,” Matthew Gasda asserts. There may be “millions of fascinating diaries sitting in filing cabinets, stuffed into storage, bookshelves, or in drawers next to nightstands,” Gasda says. Here he presents a list of literary diarists whose works represent “the tip of the iceberg of the human mind.”
People who talk with their hands seem more clear and persuasive – new research
Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo, assistant professor of Marketing at the University of Southern California, discusses results of his new work published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Having grown up in Italy, “where gesturing is practically a second language,” he’s interested in the question of whether gestures make communicators effective.
Rizzo’s research found that gestures can give listeners a visual shortcut to meaning and make abstract ideas feel more concrete, but only if the gestures match the message. Movements such as “random waving, fidgeting or pointing to things in the space” don’t offer the same benefit.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
