What Are We Protecting Children from by Banning Books? “Reading the titles that have been challenged and removed from public-school libraries across the country.” I’ve lately given up on posting links to articles about censorship across the United States because they’re too numerous and, frankly, too depressing to keep up with. But this article by …
You Can Watch ‘Kaleidoscope’ Episodes in Any Order. A Complete Guide I love novels with unusual structures. So when I read that the episodes of Netflix’s new drama Kaleidoscope could be viewed in any order, I had to check it out. This article from CNET discusses how several choices can affect the way viewers experience the …
The dawn of AI has come, and its implications for education couldn’t be more significant The anxiety and questions about AI-generated writing continue: “t’s safe to say we can expect some challenging years ahead.” Vitomir Kovanovic, Senior Lecturer in Learning Analytics at the University of South Australia, speculates. Category: Writing Women Talking Embraces the Drama …
The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions Novelist and critic Naomi Kanakia, who belongs to two book clubs, uses the context of her book group discussions to examine why we read fiction. The point of novels, she writes, “is that something happened. Something was at stake in this story. Characters made decisions. Those decisions had consequences. …
How Librarians Can Counter Lies from Book Banners This problem isn’t going to go away any time soon, so we need to stay informed. Categories: Censorship, Libraries 5 Messy Characters You Can’t Help But Love My favorite phrase for describing humans is “deliciously messy.” So I immediately zoomed in on this list by Zeniya Cooley: …
Why does experiencing ‘flow’ feel so good? A communication scientist explains I’ve written here about flow before (here and here). In this article Richard Huskey, an assistant professor of communication and cognitive science at the University of California, Davis, discusses how the concept of flow figures into his resolutions for 2022. He has been studying flow …
What Our Biggest Best-Sellers Tell Us About a Nation’s Soul “Reading America through more than two centuries of its favorite books.” In The New Yorker, Louis Menand takes on Jess McHugh’s book Americanon, which discusses “thirteen American books, from ‘The Old Farmer’s Almanac,’ first published in 1792, to Stephen R. Covey’s ‘The 7 Habits of …
A Literary Guide to Combat Anti-Asian Racism in America “Anti-Asian violence and discrimination has increased precipitously, but it has a long history in the United States” Jae-Yeon Yoo and Stefani Kuo offer a reading list to help readers in the U.S. better understand racism against Asian Americans: We’ve compiled this list as a way to …
What’s Behind the Label ‘Domestic Fiction’? Soledad Fox Maura, professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Williams College and soon-to-debut novelist, wonders why World Cat “(the biggest library search engine on the planet)” has classified her upcoming novel, Madrid Again, as domestic fiction: Why would my novel, about an itinerant bilingual mother and daughter who …
