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The 20 In-Flight Crime Movie Options on This Airplane, Ranked This article amused me because, by the time you read this, I will have spent some huge number of hours flying from the West Coast of the U.S. to Amsterdam to embark on a 6-week cruise. As much as I enjoy traveling, I hate these […]

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A small ocean cruise ship on the water, with green hills and a snow-covered mountain peak in the background.

On Vacation

Today my husband and I embark on a vacation that will take us up the coast of Norway, to Iceland, to Greenland, across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada, then down the east coast of North America to New York City. Since we will be at sea most of the time, internet accessibility will be spotty

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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

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Background: 3 stacked, closed books; open notebook with pen on top. Text: 15 Years Ago on Notes in the Margin

15 Years Ago on Notes in the Margin

Related Post: A look back at the archives reveals that I didn’t publish much content during June 2010. That doesn’t surprise me, since I was concentrating on finishing my dissertation so that I could graduate the following summer. Here’s the single substantive piece for that month, from June 5, 2010: The Psychology of Reading: A

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Linwood Barclay on the Art of Making Everyday Things Terrifying “Making people fear things in their everyday lives in ways they never did before, that’s the dream of every writer of suspenseful tales,” prolific thriller author Linwood Barclay tells us.  How the far right seeks to spread its ideology through the publishing world Jason Wilson,

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Collage of book covers: All Fours by Miranda July; The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan; Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson; Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney; Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney; The Night We Lost Him by Laura Dave; The Lost Man by Jane Harper.

6 Degrees of Separation

This month we start with Kate’s pick for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction, All Fours by Miranda July.  first degree The most recent novel I’ve read that features a number in its title is The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan. second degree I’ve recently read a novel by another author named

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stack of books and open notebook. Label: Quotation

On Crime Novels & Thrillers

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Brain oscillations reveal dynamic shifts in creative thought during metaphor generation Since I’ve written earlier about metaphors as novel titles, this article fascinated me. It reports on recent research into “the neural mechanisms behind metaphor generation, a creative skill that plays an important role in how people understand complex concepts and communicate abstract ideas.” The

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A stack of 3 closed books, next to an open notebook on which rests a ballpoint pen. Text: Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature

Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature

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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