Skim This!

“…the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight … these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading.” — Maryanne Wolf On […]

Proust as Antidote for Smartphone-Induced Attention Deficit

“Daniel Mendelsohn had a particularly modern take on the value of reading Proust’s densely written, heavily detailed, slowly unfolding opus known as In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past).: Recently I was traveling on a train next to a young man—a recent college graduate, I guessed—who was reading a hugely fat Victorian novel. […]

John and Yoko’s Wedding Album, Once an Oddity, Now an Icon

“…all these years later, with wars raging endlessly around the world and still achieving nothing except pain and destruction, Wedding Album’s message of peace and love — of peace being rooted in and nurtured by love — sounds wiser and more urgent than ever.” John and Yoko’s Wedding Album, Once an Oddity, Now an Icon

How Mary Oliver Helped Me to Breathe Again – Brandon Taylor on the Gift that is “Wild Geese”

“I feel worthy of being in the world when I think of “Wild Geese.” I feel that the world has use for me, that there is a place for me in the world that is vaster and greater and eternal.” – Brandon Taylor How Mary Oliver Helped Me to Breathe Again Poet Mary Oliver Dies […]

The top 100 stories according to the BBC

BBC Culture asked writers around the globe to pick stories that have endured across generations and continents – and changed society. The 100 stories that shaped the world 1. The Odyssey (Homer, 8th Century BC) 2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852) 3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818) 4. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949) 5. […]

The Art of Solitude

Solitude? In this time of endless noise? Here’s an article on the importance of solitude. “If [Blaise] Pascal’s observation about our inability to sit quietly in a room by ourselves is true of the human condition in general, then the issue has certainly been augmented by an order of magnitude due to the options available […]

On the Joys of Difficult Reading

Why should reading be difficult, if not confrontational? Because reading a book like Ulysses by James Joyce is an accomplishment and a unique experience. It’s not easy and isn’t meant to be. Another example might be Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. That being said, these example books aren’t for everybody, and not everyone has […]

Fernando Pessoa’s Afterlife

Pessoa was to have an extraordinary afterlife, as he prophesied in his poem “If I Die Young”: “roots may be hidden in the ground / But their flowers flower in the open air for all to see. / It must be so. Nothing can prevent it.” Among his belongings when he died was a large […]

On the Dark, Wondrous Optimism of Ray Bradbury

“Bradbury, who never used a computer or drove a car (and believed automobiles more dangerous than war), could be described by a little-known word in English derived from Portuguese, nefelibata: one who walks in the clouds. For better or for worse, we don’t as yet live in the future he imagined, and his predictions and […]

“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.” – Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich, as a poet, essayist and feminist activist, held strong to her convictions. Here is some ‘life advice’ from her, which has resonated even more crucially as counterbalance to the current political climate. “Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to […]