The dawn of the post-literate society
If the reading revolution [of the middle of the eighteenth century] represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the [current] screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.
James Marriott laments the “draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence.”
The Polyglot Neuroscientist Resolving How the Brain Parses Language
“Is language core to thought, or a separate process? For 15 years, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has gathered evidence of a language network in the human brain — and has found some similarities to LLMs.”
Because thoughts come to me in words, I’ve always assumed that thinking and language are part of the same process. Katherine Taylor profiles cognitive neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko, who, for the last 15 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been “gathering biological evidence” that the brain contains a language network separate from cognition (thinking).
If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?
“Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences.”
Jay Caspian Kang writes in The New Yorker about his experience of cutting way down on social media participation in order to meet a book deadline. He writes that he finished his book on time, “But the other imagined effects of a social-media detox never quite materialized.”
The Empty Lab, in Science and in Fiction
The problem with science fiction is that it so often relies on fictional science.
The genre’s scientists are reduced to stereotypes, crude cartoons evenly divided between Einsteins and Frankensteins—wild-haired theoretical geniuses on one side, heartless experimentalists on the other. The science in such stories is equally untethered to reality. It tends to manifest as a thick paste of technical terms slathered across holes in the plot. Real science, the daily labor of trained professionals around the world, fights for elbow room in a genre packed with popular but misleading tropes.
John MacNeill Miller discusses LabLit, a movement created by Jennifer L. Rohn, a cell biologist and writer, in 2005 to counteract “the inaccuracies she saw in science fiction.”
“The comparatively small number of realist fictions devoted to modern laboratory research share a decided reluctance to invite readers inside the places where so much science is practiced.”
You Don’t Have to Write Every Day to Be a Real Writer
Here’s some refreshing advice for writers by Elizabeth McCracken from her recent book A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction.
Here’s my particular favorite: “You might even discover that once you have removed your flaws to use them in fiction—like a splinter, a bee’s stinger—they no longer bother you.”
The Witchcraft of Shirley Jackson
Joyce Carol Oates delightfully discusses the delicious thrillingness of Merricat Blackwood, the protagonist of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
“AI”: A Dedicated Fact-Failing Machine, or, Yet Another Reason Not to Trust It For Anything
One of the few writers whose blog I follow is science fiction writer John Scalzi because he often has interesting things to say. Here he describes his efforts facing down an AI that insists on saying untrue things about him.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
“Books are inefficient”?!?!? 🤦