Text Is (Still) King
“Why the written word will never die.”
Psychologist Adam Mastroianni argues that all the current narratives about the decline of reading and the related decline of civilization itself “tend to leave out some inconvenient data points.”
He concludes that “humans have a hunger that no video can satisfy. Even in the midst of infinite addictive entertainment, some people still want to read.”
Stop Meeting Students Where They Are
“What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again.”
There’s been a lot written lately about the decline in students’ ability to read whole works of literature instead of just excerpts. Because students, the argument goes, no longer have the ability to work their way through whole novels, many teachers, in both high school and college, no longer assign them.
Walt Hunter, professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, argues that “teachers of literature are wrong to give up assigning the books we loved ourselves.” Here Hunter describes how he approached teaching an introductory survey course covering the first 400 years of American literature so that students would have time to do the required reading; his approach included replacing the traditional long research paper with short essays about how students experienced the reading written in class. He concludes, “There may be plenty of good reasons to despair over the present. The literature classroom should not be one of them.”
The “Real” Self, Psychoanalysis, and Autobiography: A Conversation with Naomi Washer
Sophie Newman interviews Naomi Washer, author of Marginalia, an “autobiographical exploration of the self through margin notes.” Newman describes Washer’s book as “a rich exploration of consciousness—thought alchemizing thought. And through these fragments, a narrator emerges on the page, a self that is as layered, dynamic, and complex as the machinations of the psyche.”
One of the questions Washer discusses is how the process of becoming a psychoanalyst has “informed [her] writing and the idea of the autobiographical self.”
The New Fabio Is Claude
“The romance industry, always at the vanguard of technological change, is rapidly adapting to A.I. Not everyone is on board.”
Alexandra Alter discusses in the New York Times how romance writers are adapting various artificial intelligence products to increase their productivity.
The Death of Book World
“What the closing of the Washington Post’s books section means for readers.”
A couple of weeks ago I reported on Ron Charles’s essay “I’ve Been Laid Off. I’m Not Done.”
Charles used to be the editor of the Washington Post’s book coverage section, Book World.
In this piece for The New Yorker Becca Rothfeld, a former nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post, offers up more details.
In Praise of One of America’s All-Time Great Book Sections (RIP)
And here retired publishing executive Gerald Howard tells us even more about the demise of Book World.
The Literary Ecosystem Is Dying
Adam Kirsch, a senior editor at The Atlantic, puts the demise of Book World into historical perspective:
the [Washington] Post was making the same business decision that most other publications have made. People don’t want to read book reviews—at least, not enough people to make publishing them worthwhile. It’s a vicious circle. As people feel less of a need to keep up with new books, they stop reading reviews; publications respond by cutting books coverage, so readers don’t hear about new books; as a result, they buy fewer books, which makes publications think they’re not worth covering.
7 Novels About Women Becoming Beasts
“In these books, women turn monstrous to reclaim their humanity”
Debut novelist (The Fox Hunt) Caitlin Breeze describes a feeling she’s been having recently:
It’s a strange kind of claustrophobia: emotional, physical, psychic. A sense that your skin has become a jar with the lid screwed on too tight. In those moments, I want stories that blow the lid off. Tales where women reach the point where their human shape can’t contain them anymore and something in them refuses to stay small. Stories where metamorphosis isn’t a curse, but a way out. A widening of the self, an unfurling, a reclamation of the things women are told to suppress: anger, appetite, selfish desires.
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
So much has changed in the literary world since I first started out!