The Summer Reading Guide If you’re still drawing up your summer reading plan, The Atlantic has 25 recommendations for books in the following categories: What Close Reading Can Reveal About an Author’s Intentions I was always taught that we cannot know what an author intended to do; we can only see what an author has […]
We’re All Reading Wrong “To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud.” Journalist Alexandra Moe informs us “Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud.” She continues: “To reap the full benefits of
A simple illusion can unlock your childhood memories, according to new psychology research Recent research published in Scientific Reports suggests that “people can better access detailed memories from their childhood by experiencing an illusion of owning a younger version of their own face”: Our memories are not just recordings of external events; they are experiences
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Record everything! “Our memories are precious to us and constitute our sense of self. Why not enhance them by recording all of your life?” Yannic Kappes is a philosopher and a postdoc at the University of Vienna in Austria. In this article he takes the proposition that “[c]urrent technology allows for radical memory enhancement” to
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The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait The powers that be at Oxford University Press have chosen rage bait as their word of the year for 2025. Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to
How the Union Lost the Remembrance War “The victors of the American Civil War failed to write their story into the history books, leaving a gap for the mythologizing of the Confederacy.” “After the American Civil War, there was what historian Robert J. Cook calls a ‘robust and purposeful narrative’ of the Union’s defeat of
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The Best Literary Love Stories A satisfying literary love story doesn’t need to end happily ever after—but one does need to be left with a sense that two characters belong together, advises the novelist Lily King . . . Thomas Mallon’s Theory of the Diary “The New York writer and editor’s diaries of the AIDS
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
