Think for Yourself “One of the most dehumanizing effects of AI is the short cuts it offers through the gaps and impasses intrinsic to the act of writing.” For those of us who write to discover what we think about a topic, Dan Chiasson, chair of the English department at Wellesley College, addresses a fundamental […]
Do We Think Too Much About the Future? “For most of history, people didn’t try predicting it. Maybe that was wise.” One feature of life story psychology is the concept of life review, a tendency to think about the future in terms of what our lives mean and what we want to leave as a legacy.
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Is AI hurting your ability to think? How to reclaim your brain Noel Carroll, an associate professor in Business Information Systems at the University of Galway, warns that “many people may be falling victim to the same phenomenon – outsourcing the ‘struggle’ of thinking to AI.” He calls this condition “cognitive atrophy.” Essentially, AI is
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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Novels Based on Mythological Retellings On the relationship between culture, psychology, folklore, mythology, and history: Mythological retellings bring us stories with timeless resonance, viewed through the lens of modern concerns, explains Francesca Simon. The bestselling author tells us about her five favourite retellings. On Slaughterhouse-Five, the “Ultimate PTSD Novel” In this excerpt from his book
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The 30 best nonfiction books of the last 30 years The Los Angeles Times is compiling a series of “30 Best” lists in honor of this year’s celebration of the 30th anniversary of its annual Festival of Books. Here are its top nonfiction titles. The Age of Genre Bending, Blending, and Juxtaposing Novelist and essayist
Culture wars: Trump’s takeover of arts is straight from the dictator playbook “US president’s attempt to control or dismantle cultural institutions plays into a long history of authoritarians using arts to push their agenda” Sorry not sorry: Prepare to be harangued for the next 4 years. We’ve moved way past politics now here in the
A Classic Chronicle of Korean America: On Kim Ronyoung’s Clay Walls “David S. Cho Explores Ideas of Homeland, Belonging and Identity in a Pioneering Contribution to Asian American Literature” Novels that introduce us to people from cultures other than our own contribute to human understanding in a global context. Clay Walls is a truly pioneering
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Hanif Kureishi’s Relentlessly Revealing Memoir “How a tragic accident helped the author find his rebellious voice again” In December 2022, at age 68, writer Hanif Kureishi fell onto a hard floor in Rome and woke up a tetraplegic. Hillary Kelly visited Kureishi in London in December 2024 and here describes that visit and comments on
