The Making of America’s Frontier Mythology Was the Making of America Just as individuals have life stories, so do nations, ethnic groups, and other collective aspects of culture and society. In this excerpt from the book The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West, Paul Andrew Hutton examines how, beginning in […]
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Federal judge overturns part of Florida’s book ban law, drawing on nearly 100 years of precedent protecting First Amendment access to ideas James B. Blasingame is a professor of English at Arizona State University and a former high school English teacher who has “tried to learn as much as I can about the history of
#bookstodon #BookBlog #literature This Is Your Brain on Tropes: Why Readers are Addicted to the Familiar In the world of literature, a trope is: Monique Snyman explains that “tropes aren’t just lazy storytelling, as so many people like to say. Tropes are brain candy. And our brains are wired to crave them.” How Publishing Has
People Are Trying to ‘Deprogram’ Their MAGA Parents Through Book Clubs “Divisive politics have led people to go “no contact” with their right-wing parents. Some hope reading together could help bridge the gap.” A report from Wired. The Psychology Of Suspense: Why Are Thrillers So Addicting? I’m fond of thrillers, although I never thought to
Scientists uncover surprisingly consistent pattern of scholarly curiosity throughout history Sometimes the more things seem to change, the more they stay the same. By analyzing the recorded interests of thousands of scholars born before 1700, researchers found that intellectual curiosity tends to cluster around three broad domains: the human, the natural, and the abstract. These
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August 21 has been celebrated as National Senior Citizens Day in the United States since President Ronald Reagan so proclaimed in 1988: For all they have achieved throughout life and for all they continue to accomplish, we owe older citizens our thanks and a heartfelt salute. We can best demonstrate our gratitude and esteem by
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A Harvard Professor Breaks Down the Real Rules of Writing Jason Hellerman summarizes an interview with Harvard linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker about “what makes great writing and how you can command attention in the modern era.” The target audience for this piece is writers interested in producing fiction and screenwriting for the general
After the Deluge: What Future for Climate Fiction? Keith Woodhouse discusses “an emerging subgenre that we might call the ‘climate assessment drama.’ These books are vast in size and scope and, at the same time, narrowly concerned with the particular political, ethical, and technical conundrums of the world climate change has wrought.” Why Do Doctors
Refugee Lit Stakes Its Worthy Claim “In a refugee camp,” Iranian American author Dina Nayeri writes in her 2019 novelistic memoir, The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You, “stories are everything. Everyone has one, having just slipped out from the grip of a nightmare, [they] transported us out of our places of exile, to
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A Deep Dive into the Mind of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson “The rise and fall of the Beach Boys leader shows how crucial the brain’s executive function is to creativity” Occasioned by the death of Brian Wilson on June 11, 2025, Scientific American has updated this article from 2017 (which was itself an update
