What’s Happening to Reading?
“For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.”
“What will happen to reading culture as reading becomes automated?” asks Joshua Rothman in this article in The New Yorker. He examines how new technology such as ereaders and artificial intelligence have changed and will continue to change our approach to reading for both pleasure and information gathering.
Do you really need to read to learn? What neuroscience says about reading versus listening
Stephanie N. Del Tufo, assistant professor of Education & Human Development at the University of Delaware, studies “how biological factors and social experiences shape language.” “Whether reading a book or listening to a recording, the goal is the same: understanding,” she writes. But, while both reading and listening are important, “they are not interchangeable,” she argues.
‘There’s a thug in all of us’: James Norton on privacy, playing villains and pushing himself to the limit
I’ve been impressed by the work of British actor James Norton ever since I discovered him in Happy Valley (a crime drama shown in the U.S. over one of the British channels offered by Amazon Prime) and the first few seasons of Grantchester (on PBS). In this article I discovered that Norton played the part of Jude in a stage production of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life (scroll down to 34).
7 Books That Break the Confines of Plot
“Calling these books ‘plotless’ ignores their radical storytelling”
I’m often drawn to fiction that’s described as experimental in some way; sometimes the experiment involves the author’s presentation of plot. But what exactly is plot? Here Briish fiction writer Issa Quincy, author of the novel Absence, addresses that question:
Plotting, for me, is a retroactive action—only once the thing is formed can I think about the shape of the work, cast the throughline of it . . . My qualm with this whole plotting business comes from the fact that I often feel the label to be pejorative; to focus on plot, or its “absence” is often to lazily discount, or ignore all the other choices, explorations and observations made within the text.
I haven’t yet read any of the novels Quincy includes in this list, but I have written before about plot (see How Narrative Structure Works in Fiction: And How It Differs from Plot.)
André Aciman on Reading—and Misreading—Emotions
“The ‘Call Me by Your Name’ author on novels about people misunderstanding the situations in which they find themselves.”
In this interview, Aciman discusses “some of his favorite ‘psychological’ novels, which track the perceptions—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—of their characters closely.”
Two of the three novels he discusses are a couple of my favorites: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton and Emma by Jane Austen. About Emma he says:
[Austen’s] portrait of Emma is, I think, superb. It shows a woman of twentysomething with a newfound sense of authority about her, who is constantly drawing the wrong conclusion from things. And this constant error is what I love about analytical fiction, because the errors are misreadings of situations that are suddenly corrected, only to be undercut yet again.
Never Too Old for Murder: Why An Elderly Woman Character Is the Perfect Serial Killer
“Samantha Downing on Using Ageism and Gendered Assumptions to Hide in Plain Sight”
“I have written several books with serial killers as protagonists . . . Now, after twenty-five years of writing, I have discovered the perfect serial killer may be an elderly woman,” writes Samantha Downing about her most recent novel, Too Old for This. Read about the “quite a few advantages to being an older woman” that make her such a good candidate for serial killer protagonist.
What It’s Like to Brainstorm with a Bot
“At the frontiers of knowledge, researchers are discovering that A.I. doesn’t just take prompts—it gives them, too, sparking new forms of creativity and collaboration.”
There’s so much continuous discussion of AI going on that I’m now trying to focus on articles that offer a new (or at least new to me) take on the subject. Here Dan Rockmore, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth, explains how academicians can use “new generative-A.I. tools” as collaborators to advance creative thinking in their pursuit of knowledge.
Assimilation-induced dehumanization: Psychology research uncovers a dark side effect of AI
AI researchers have been working to make their programs sound and react like people in their interactions with humans. This article reports on research recently published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology that reveals an unexpected result of such efforts:
when people interact with autonomous agents—such as robots or virtual assistants—that display strong emotional intelligence, they tend to see those machines as more humanlike. But this shift comes with an unintended consequence: people may also begin to see other humans as less human, leading to a higher likelihood of mistreating them.
The value of scribbling in the margins
Richart Fisher ruminates on the benefits of writing and doodling in the margins.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
