Deep reading can boost your critical thinking and help you resist misinformation – here’s how to build the skill
Two college professors, a cognitive scientist and a literacy expert, explain the drawbacks of doomscrolling and how deep reading can help overcome brain passivity.
Deep reading . . . refers to the intentional process of engaging with information in critical, analytical and empathetic ways. It involves making inferences, drawing connections, engaging with different perspectives and questioning possible interpretations.
Publishers agree The Salt Path crossed a line
“The bestselling ‘memoir’ betrayed the trust of readers, according to those in the industry, but at what point should firms turn their backs on a money-spinner?”
In this opinion piece Erica Wagner writes:
The issues that surround publishing non-fiction and memoir are not simple: one can only hope that publishers strive to avoid active deceit as they attend – as they must – to the bottom line.
Six Books About Ohio, the Heart of it All
This article caught my eye shortly after I had finished reading Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. Here Lauren Schott, an Ohio native who set her debut thriller Very Slowly All at Once in a Cleveland suburb, explains her choice of setting:
For me, Ohio is the place where so much of America swirls together: the prim stoicism of New Englanders, the bravado of New Yorkers, a helping of Southern charm, some good old Appalachian grit. It’s not always an easy mix and the landscape can be unforgiving, but, as so many of these novels show, even the darker side of life in Ohio offers up rich lives worth examining.
‘Read this and you will be happier’: experts pick the self-help books that really work
In this series of interviews for The Guardian, “Philippa Perry, Paul Dolan, Orna Guralnik and others reveal the books that will change your life.” Read suggestion for books that will help you find love, have better conversations, sustain a long-term relationship, stop being a people pleaser, be happier, navigate trauma, handle stress, tackle narcissism, become a better parent, understand neurodiversity, and maintain focus.
15 Small Press Books You Don’t Want to Miss This Winter
“Now more than ever, it feels vital to support the work of independent presses who operate in a media landscape driven by ideas and inquiry, rather than units sold,” says novelist Wendy J. Fox. Here she recommends 15 such works.
Why Are We Still So Afraid of Using the Grumpy Old Period?
Much more than a simple defense of the most common punctuation mark in the English language, this article addresses the huge issues surrounding the question of how texts and emails, which lack the formalization of traditional language usage, should be worded and punctuated without the use of inflections and facial expressions.
LMAO, but not kidding.
Wikipedia volunteers spent years cataloging AI tells. Now there’s a plugin to avoid them.
“The web’s best guide to spotting AI writing has become a manual for hiding it.”
[Recently] tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called “Humanizer,” the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as chatbot giveaways. Chen published the plugin on GitHub. . .
Here’s yet another entry for your database file “you can’t make this stuff up.”
Val McDermid was assigned ‘sensitivity reader’ to cut offensive language from old books
“Author discusses changes made to Lindsay Gordon novels from 80s and 90s to prepare for their rerelease”
Scottish crime writer Val McDermid was assigned a sensitivity reader to suggest changes that should be made before republication of “books she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s [that] featured characters in law enforcement who used racial and homophobic slurs to reflect attitudes that were prevalent at the time.”
“I think it’s kind of interesting to look at novels that were written in a particular time. A lot has changed in 40 years. But a book set in 1987 can’t suddenly have the sensibilities of a book that’s going to be published now.”
12 Top WordPress Themes People Actually Use in 2026 (Tested & Ranked)
Notes in the Margin has been around, in one form or another, since 1997. Over its lifetime I’ve been through just about all of the changes involved in the process of blogging (a term that didn’t even exist when Notes first appeared on the internet). Occasionally I come across articles like this that remind me of all those changes and how different the process is now.
If I were starting Notes in the Margin now, I’d find this article helpful. Even if I didn’t end up choosing WordPress as my platform, I’d learn a lot about important points to consider.
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
I’ve always enjoyed deep reading. Writing book reviews is helping me a lot in that regard.