Is AI hurting your ability to think? How to reclaim your brain
Noel Carroll, an associate professor in Business Information Systems at the University of Galway, warns that “many people may be falling victim to the same phenomenon – outsourcing the ‘struggle’ of thinking to AI.” He calls this condition “cognitive atrophy.”
Essentially, AI is replacing tasks many people have grown reluctant to do themselves – thinking, writing, creating, analysing. But when we don’t use these skills, they can decline.
Here he lists warning signs of cognitive atrophy and suggests ways to reclaim your thinking.
This information can help with both reading comprehension and writing ability.
Fanfiction Made Me a Literary Scholar
“Fanfiction assumes what any literary scholarship worth its salt must acknowledge: Narrative is a social act”
Dr. Sarah Jilani, a Lecturer in English at the University of London who teaches postcolonial literatures and world cinema, describes how writing fanfiction as a teenager led to her academic career.
Long before I learned what close reading meant, or encountered intimidating phrases like intertextuality, narrative theory, or hermeneutics, I was already practicing them—just in a very different classroom.
Through Animal Eyes: On trash and speculative fiction, part 3
This is part 3 of a series; you’ll find a link to the rest at the beginning of the article, although this essay can be read on its own.
B.D. McClay considers what it’s like to imagine and to write about a creature that is nonhuman. McClay looks at some science fiction and speculative fiction works that have done just that. “Life as seen through other animal eyes is the closest we really come, and may ever come, to the science-fictional encounters between man and a different form of sentience.”
George Saunders Wants a Good Death
“The celebrated author’s new novel Vigil was inspired by his own hopes and fears for the end of his life—and the end of civilization.”
Adam Morgan interviews author George Saunders about life and his recent novel Vigil. The original idea for the novel came to Saunders in 2023 “when a category 5 cyclone killed more than 400 people in the Bay of Bengal and floods disrupted food supply chains around the world.” Saunders wondered how climate-change deniers from the early 2000s “would feel now, decades later, near the end of their lives, when climate-change-driven catastrophes were constantly in the news.”
And my TBR shelf just got one book heavier.
The Brilliance and the Badness of “The Sun Also Rises”
“Although Ernest Hemingway’s novel makes positive claims about what one should be—brave, admiring of nature and grace—its architecture is held up primarily by hatred.”
If you’ve ever wondered if rereading is valuable or just a waste of time, this article is for you. Akhil Sharma describes how differently he read Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises when he was 15 and when he was 54.
Readers just want good stories, regardless of character’s gender
“In the publishing industry, there’s a common belief that men won’t read novels about women, but new research out of Cornell finds just the opposite,” writes Patricia Waldron of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. The study authors hope that “this work will encourage the publishing industry to promote more books with a variety of girl and women characters.”
New findings challenge assumptions about men’s reading habits
This article reports on the same research as the link directly above. The discussion here is more complete, describing how the study was designed, the limitations of the study, and what the researchers see as further areas to study in future research.
5 Novels with Perfectly Unsympathetic Protagonists
Author Sophie Hannah opens with this admission:
I don’t really believe in the distinction between sympathetic and unsympathetic characters. All fictional people (and perhaps all real people too, or almost all) are both unsympathetic and sympathetic in different ways and to varying extents.
She believes that “unsympathetic characters create sympathetic readers and sympathetic humans.” She offers a list of her “top five novels containing unsympathetic protagonists” to illustrate her point.
I’ve Been Laid Off. I’m Not Done.
I’ve written before about how much I enjoyed the weekly newsletter from Ron Charles, the head of the Washington Post’s Book World section. Recently the newspaper laid off more than 300 staff members in its latest effort to reinvent itself under owner Jeff Bezos, who also owns Amazon. This latest reduction in force includes the elimination of the paper’s entire Book World section. In this Substack piece Ron Charles examines his options moving forward.
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
