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on stories
"Very few people seem to want to see their lives in terms of one pointless thing after another."
--Alice Munro (from this interview here) -
the spaces in between
Idle Minds and What They May Say about Intelligence
... for the first time, functional measures of the resting brain are providing new insights into network properties of the brain that are associated with IQ scores. In essence, they suggest that in smart people, distant areas of the brain communicate with each other more robustly than in less smart ( Read more... ) -
"I am going to keep doing this. I cannot be stopped."
Aleksander Hemon + Colum McCann: an interview
CM: [...] Of course, elementally, one of the functions of writing-even if unread-is that it lasts. But so much writing in the past few years-so much of what seems to garner praise-is housebroken and mannered and so very well-behaved. Want to say a couple of bad words? Say social novel. Want to say a ( Read more... ) -
on Barack Obama and Eliza Doolittle
I don't have time to write, really, but lately everything I read or watch or hear, I just want to run up to strangers on the street and press it into their hands. Here, I'd say, take this, and then run off to catch my train. So please, take this.
Zadie Smith, "Speaking in Tongues"
Read or listen, at your leisure, because as usual I have chosen the ( Read more... ) -
on translation, bilingualism, culture, and... well, everything
Arts & Letters Daily was this glorious beacon of Culture when I was in high school, alongside NPR and the New Yorker, and then the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. (Goodness! I seem to have migrated east in the meanwhile, with a lot more Chicago going on, but the list still stands. Oh, and I went to NYC for the first time ever ( Read more... ) -
"No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street."
Florence King, on keeping a journal:
My longest journal entry takes up a whole page, but not the same page. It's three quotations that I copied into three different notebooks over a period of time. One day, I heard a click in my head and everything fell into place, so I hauled it all together and drew my own conclusion:
Tacitus ( Read more... ) -
1. The Age of Innocence
Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, ultimately born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to ( Read more... ) -
setting the mind
On Dweck’s mind-set research:
Students for whom performance is paramount want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which they’re sure to shine-and avoid the sorts of experiences ( Read more... ) -
on caffeine, acceptable drugs, and modern life
Reading [author of Blink] Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker archives:
It is worth noting, as well, that in the original coffeehouses nearly everyone smoked, and nicotine also has a distinctive physiological effect. It moderates mood and extends attention, and, more important, it doubles the rate of caffeine metabolism: it allows you to drink twice as ( Read more... )
