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Lawrence Hrubes

Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize for literature | Entertainment & Showbiz from CTV News - 0 views

www.ctvnews.ca/...prize-for-literature-1.1491581

TOK art literature NobelPrize judgment criteria value Munro

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13
     
    ""I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way -- what happens to somebody -- but I want that 'what happens' to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing -- not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.""
Lawrence Hrubes

"Books Smell Like Old People": Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...le-the-decline-of-teen-reading

literature education proof technology teens arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Lifetime readers know that reading literature can be transformative, but they can’t prove it. If they tried, they would have to buck the metric prejudice, the American notion that assertions unsupported with statistics are virtually meaningless. What they know about literature and its effects is literally and spiritually immeasurable. They would have to buck common marketplace wisdom, too: in an economy demanding “skill sets”—defined narrowly as technical and business skills—that deep-reading stuff won’t get you anywhere.
Lawrence Hrubes

Reading With Imagination - NYTimes.com - 2 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...reading-with-imagination

arts literature imagination

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Fiction, which I believe suffers most from modern readership, is by definition not factual. It may be about the real world and it may try to illuminate some facts about the real world or how real people behave in it or, as is so often the case in modern literature, it may also be about the impossibility of portraying any such reality since the very nature of art is artifice. Primarily, however, fiction (and biography, essay, history, memoir only perhaps to a lesser degree) is a creative act, an act of the author’s imagination and likewise, ideally, it should be read with imagination.
Lawrence Hrubes

Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians - The British Library - 1 views

www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians

literature arts authors

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 May 14 - No Cached
  • Discover 1,200 Romantic and Victorian literary treasures, new insights by 60 experts, 25 documentary films, 30 inspirational teachers’ notes and more.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 22 May 14
     
    connections to ISP: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Jane Austen; Charles Dickens
Lawrence Hrubes

How English Ruined Indian Literature - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-ruined-indian-literature.html

language culture India indigenous knowledge systems English

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “English is not a language in India,” a friend once told me. “It is a class.” This friend, an aspiring Bollywood actor, knew firsthand what it meant to be from the wrong class. Absurd as it must sound, he was frequently denied work in the Hindi film industry for not knowing English. “They want you to walk in the door speaking English. Then if you switch to Hindi, they like it. Otherwise they say, ‘the look doesn’t fit.’ ” My friend, who comes from a small town in the Hindi-speaking north, knew very well why his look didn’t fit. He knew, too, from the example of dozens of upper-middle class, English-speaking actors, that the industry would rather teach someone with no Hindi the language from scratch than hire someone like him.
  • India has had languages of the elite in the past — Sanskrit was one, Persian another. They were needed to unite an entity more linguistically diverse than Europe. But there was perhaps never one that bore such an uneasy relationship to the languages operating beneath it, a relationship the Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock has described as “a scorched-earth policy,” as English.India, if it is to speak to itself, will always need a lingua franca. But English, which re-enacts the colonial relationship, placing certain Indians in a position the British once occupied, does more than that. It has created a linguistic line as unbreachable as the color line once was in the United States.Continue reading the main story
  • That student, Sheshamuni Shukla, studied classical grammar in the Sanskrit department. He had spent over a decade mastering rules of grammar set down by the ancient Indian grammarians some 2,000 years before. He spoke pure and beautiful Hindi; in another country, a number of careers might have been open to him. But in India, without English, he was powerless. Despite his grand education, he would be lucky to end up as a teacher or a clerk in a government office. He felt himself a prisoner of language. “Without English, there is no self-confidence,” he said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But around the time of my parents’ generation, a break began to occur. Middle-class parents started sending their children in ever greater numbers to convent and private schools, where they lost the deep bilingualism of their parents, and came away with English alone. The Indian languages never recovered. Growing up in Delhi in the 1980s, I spoke Hindi and Urdu, but had to self-consciously relearn them as an adult. Many of my background didn’t bother.
Lawrence Hrubes

A Dig Through Old Files Reminds Me Why I'm So Critical of Science | Cross-Check, Scient... - 1 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...-why-im-so-critical-of-science

TOK science skepticism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Nov 13
     
    "Arguably the biggest meta-story in science over the last few years-and one that caught me by surprise-is that much of the peer-reviewed scientific literature is rotten. A pioneer in exposing this vast problem is the Stanford statistician John Ioannidis, whose blockbuster 2005 paper in PLOS Medicine presented evidence that "most current published research findings are false." Discussing his findings in Scientific American two years ago, Ioannidis writes: "False positives and exaggerated results in peer-reviewed scientific studies have reached epidemic proportions in recent years. The problem is rampant in economics, the social sciences and even the natural sciences, but it is particularly egregious in biomedicine.""
markfrankel18

Effectiveness of Talk Therapy Is Overstated, a Study Says - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...for-depression-overstated.html

TOK psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 02 Oct 15
     
    "Medical literature has overstated the benefits of talk therapy for depression, in part because studies with poor results have rarely made it into journals, researchers reported Wednesday."
Lawrence Hrubes

Imagining the Lives of Others - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...imagining-the-lives-of-others

imagination psychology politics literature

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 09 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • What could be more exhilarating than experiencing the world through the perspective of another person? In “Remembrance of Things Past,” Marcel Proust’s narrator says that the only true voyage of discovery is not to visit other lands but “to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds.” This is one of the central projects of the humanities; it’s certainly part of the pleasure we get from art and literature.
  • People are often highly confident in their ability to see things as others do, but their attempts are typically barely better than chance. Other studies find that people who are instructed to take the perspectives of others tend to do worse, not better, at judging their thoughts and emotions.
  • There are certain limits, however, to how far we can go. The philosopher Laurie Paul, in her book “Transformative Experience,” argues that it’s impossible to actually imagine what it would be like to have certain deeply significant experiences, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. The same lack of access applies to our understanding of others. If I can’t know what it would be like for me to fight in a war, how can I expect to understand what it was like for someone else to have fought in a war? If I can’t understand what it would be like to become poor, how can I know what it’s like for someone else to be poor?
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - The hidden messages in children's books - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...-hidden-messages-in-kids-books

TOK literature

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Adults often find surprising subtexts in children’s literature – but are they really there?
  • Just because we might not be aware of such adult messages when we read books as kids, doesn’t mean we aren’t absorbing them, she adds. “However far this kind of ‘message’ seems to leap out at the adult reader, it is probably closer to the truth to say that the message has always been there but the knowledge that allows it to be recognised has not.”
markfrankel18

Book Review: The Half-Life of Facts - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4894104578113590368047244.html

science

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Knowledge, then, is less a canon than a consensus in a state of constant disruption. Part of the disruption has to do with error and its correction, but another part with simple newness—outright discoveries or new modes of classification and analysis, often enabled by technology.
  • ore commonly, however, changes in scientific facts reflect the way that science is done. Mr. Arbesman describes the "Decline Effect"—the tendency of an original scientific publication to present results that seem far more compelling than those of later studies. Such a tendency has been documented in the medical literature over the past decade by John Ioannidis, a researcher at Stanford, in areas as diverse as HIV therapy, angioplasty and stroke treatment. The cause of the decline may well be a potent combination of random chance (generating an excessively impressive result) and publication bias (leading positive results to get preferentially published). If shaky claims enter the realm of science too quickly, firmer ones often meet resistance. As Mr. Arbesman notes, scientists struggle to let go of long-held beliefs, something that Daniel Kahneman has described as "theory-induced blindness." Had the Austrian medical community in the 1840s accepted the controversial conclusions of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis that physicians were responsible for the spread of childbed fever—and heeded his hand-washing recommendations—a devastating outbreak of the disease might have been averted.
Lawrence Hrubes

Pondering Miracles, Medical and Religious - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...les-medical-and-religious.html

religious knowledge systems science medicine miracles faith

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The tribunal that questioned me was not juridical, but ecclesiastical. I was not asked about my faith. (For the record, I’m an atheist.) I was not asked if it was a miracle. I was asked if I could explain it scientifically. I could not, though I had come armed for my testimony with the most up-to-date hematological literature, which showed that long survivals following relapses were not seen.
  • When, at the end, the Vatican committee asked if I had anything more to say, I blurted out that as much as her survival, thus far, was remarkable, I fully expected her to relapse some day sooner or later. What would the Vatican do then, revoke the canonization? The clerics recorded my doubts. But the case went forward and d’Youville was canonized on Dec. 9, 1990.
  • Respect for our religious patients demands understanding and tolerance; their beliefs are as true for them as the “facts” may be for physicians. Now almost 40 years later, that mystery woman is still alive and I still cannot explain why. Along with the Vatican, she calls it a miracle. Why should my inability to offer an explanation trump her belief? However they are interpreted, miracles exist, because that is how they are lived in our world.
Lawrence Hrubes

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | Talk Video | TED - 0 views

new.ted.com/...e_the_danger_of_a_single_story

TOK arts literature storytelling culture stereotypes TEDTalk

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Feb 14
     
    "Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice - and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding."
Lawrence Hrubes

Can Writing on a College Entrance Exam Be Properly Assessed? - Room for Debate - NYTime... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ance-exam-be-properly-assessed

literature SAT testing writing assessment subjectivity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • n revamping its SAT test for college admission, the College Board is making the essay portion optional. The written assessment was controversial since it was introduced in 2005, with some college officials expressing little confidence in what it demonstrated or how it was scored. But since an increasing number of college students are taking remedial reading and writing classes, shouldn’t the essay be mandatory? Is the bigger question, how can, or should, writing be judged?
markfrankel18

Why is the 'mor' in 'Voldemort' so evil-sounding? - The Week - 0 views

theweek.com/...-in-voldemort-so-evil-sounding

TOK language literature

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • So what's the deal with "mor"? Is there something to the syllable that suits it for melancholy, darkness, and villainy? We have to be careful here. There are more words out there that have "mor" that don't carry such dark tones. The names Morgan, Maureen, and Maurice aren't so sinister (well, possibly excepting the case of Piers Morgan), and people just wanted more and more of Mork from Ork. So we can't say that this "mor" sound carries darkness and death wherever it goes. But we can say that it has some dark associations available if we want to use them. For starters, the Latin "mor" root (as in moribund and mortal and French words such as morte) refers to death; there is an old Germanic root mora for darkness, which shows up in words such as murky; our modern word murder comes from an Old English word morth for the same; and, of course, a morgue is a place where dead bodies are kept. That's enough to give a familiar ring. And every evil name that has "mor" in it adds to the weight of the association, especially when they're famous evil names. In fact, "mor" may be what is sometimes called a phonestheme: a part of a word that tends to carry a certain connotation not because of etymology or formal definition but just by association.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Teach and Study English? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...why-teach-english.html

ToK English humanities literature

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 28 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The reward is that it remains the one kind of time travel that works, where you make a wish and actually become a musketeer in Paris or a used-car salesman in Pennsylvania. That one knows, of course, that the actuality is “fictional” or artificial doesn’t change its reality. The vicarious pleasure of reading is, by the perverse principle of professions, one that is often banished from official discussion, but it remains the core activity.
  • So: Why should English majors exist? Well, there really are no whys to such things, anymore than there are to why we wear clothes or paint good pictures or live in more than hovels and huts or send flowers to our beloved on their birthday. No sane person proposes or has ever proposed an entirely utilitarian, production-oriented view of human purpose. We cannot merely produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as cheaply as possible, and die.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - Margaret Atwood's dystopian view of the future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...906-atwood-dystopian-visionary

TOK literature memory storytelling narrative arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Sep 13
     
    (video segment 3:40) "Themes in her work include dealing with the past, memory and how we tell stories about ourselves. She speaks with Talking Books' Razia Iqbal about her novels, science fiction, and the importance of storytelling"
Lawrence Hrubes

Want To Read Others' Thoughts? Try Reading Literary Fiction : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-try-reading-literary-fiction

TOK arts literature fiction EQ emotions thoughts social intelligence SocialScience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Oct 13
     
    "Your ability to "read" the thoughts and feelings of others could be affected by the kind of fiction you read. That's the conclusion of a study in the journal Science that gave tests of social perception to people who were randomly assigned to read excerpts from literary fiction, popular fiction or nonfiction."
Lawrence Hrubes

English Timeline - 1 views

www.bl.uk/...index.html

language English history linguistics TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • This interactive timeline allows you to explore the evolution of English language and literature, from the 11th century to the present day. Scroll through decade by decade to investigate the richness and diversity of our poetry and prose, as well as the many social, cultural and political strands from which our language has been woven.
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