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To that point, I’d been reading the book the way I usually read books, which is to say in five- or 10-minute snatches before bed.

I’d been reading the wrong way. John Gardner, the literary critic, wrote that the job of the novelist is to create a “vivid and continuous dream” for the reader, but I’d somehow developed a case of readerly sleep apnea.

This style of reading had, I realized, shunted me into a vicious circle. I was reading less because I was enjoying it less, which made reading even less enjoyable, which inclined me to read even less.

Maurice stumbles upon what is still the gold standard for the treatment of infantile autism: an intensive course of behavioral therapy called applied behavioral analysis that was developed by psychologist O. Ivar Lovaas at UCLA in the 1970s

in a little over a year’s time she recovers her daughter to the point that she is indistinguishable from her peers.

Let Me Hear Your Voice is not a particularly religious or pious work. It is not the story of a miracle or a faith healing

Art & Design Books Film Ideas Music & Performance TV & Radio Food & Drink Blog Return to: Home | Culture | Books The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now By George Levine Reviewed by Terry Eagleton - 22 June 2011 82 comments Print version Email a friend Listen RSS Misunderstanding what it means to be secular.

Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere

Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.“This [world] is our home," Levine comments. If he really feels at home in this crucifying set-up, one might humbly suggest that he shouldn't. Christians and political radicals certainly don't.

Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.

just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 

Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.

In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.

Who gets credit for the phrase, “view from nowhere?” # A. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a very important book with that title.

Q. What does it say? # A. It says that human beings are, in fact, capable of stepping back from their position to gain an enlarged understanding, which includes the more limited view they had before the step back. Think of the cinema: when the camera pulls back to reveal where a character had been standing and shows us a fuller tableau. To Nagel, objectivity is that kind of motion. We try to “transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully.” #

Some might see the entrenchment of child-centeredness in children’s literature as reinforcing what some social critics consider a rising tide of narcissism in young people today. But to be fair: Such criticisms of youth transcend the ages.

What is certainly true now is the primacy of “mirrors and windows,” a philosophy that strives to show children characters who reflect how they look back to them, as well as those from different backgrounds, mostly with an eye to diversity.

This is a noble goal, but those mirrors and windows should apply to adults as well. Adults are, after all, central figures in children’s lives — their parents and caregivers, their teachers, their role models

Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed and sad? To find out, you'd have to compare the emotions of one generation to another. British anthropologists think they may have found the answer — embedded in literature.

This effort began simply with lists of "emotion" words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research.

We didn't really expect to find anything," he says. "We were just curious. We really expected the use of emotion words to be constant through time." Instead, in the study they published in the journal PLOS ONE, the anthropologists found very distinct peaks and valleys, Bently says.

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

Greeks had the “first true alphabet”: a “universal” writing system that used a few letters to encode the infinite variety of all possible utterances. Similarly, all matter is written in a "language… of atoms."

Mysterious “meanings” still surround 100-year-old quantum mechanics equations

Their meaning/function/grammar is relational and sequential and word-like. The information encoded in matching sequential text-like compositions matters (DNA—>RNA, letters—>“social cartesian” lexicon).

Murray has produced a book-length argument placing responsibility for rising inequality and declining mobility on widespread decay in the moral fiber of white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans, putting relatively less emphasis on a similar social breakdown among low-status, less-educated Americans of all races

Murray’s strength lies in his ability to raise issues that center-left policy makers and academics prefer, for the most part, to shy away from. His research methods, his statistical analyses and the conclusions he draws are subject to passionate debate. But by forcing taboo issues into the public arena, Murray has opened up for discussion politically salient issues that lurk at a subterranean level in the back-brains of many voters, issues that are rarely examined with the rigor necessary to affirm or deny their legitimacy.

The National Review and the Conservative Monitor cited “Losing Ground” as one of the ten books that most changed America. Murray’s bookseemed like a bolt of lightning in the middle of the night revealing what should have been plain as the light of day. The welfare state so carefully built up in the 1960s and 1970s created a system of disincentives for people to better their own lives. By paying welfare mothers to have children out of wedlock into a poor home, more of these births were encouraged. By doling out dollars at a rate that could not be matched by the economy, the system encouraged the poor to stay home.

The response from  fellow economists, so far mainly from the liberal side of the spectrum, has verged on the rapturous. Mr. Krugman,  a columnist for The New York Times, predicted in The New York Review of Books that Mr. Piketty’s book would “change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics.”

Mr. Piketty’s dedication to data has long made him a star among economists, who credit his work on income inequality (with Emmanuel Saez and others) for diving deep into seemingly dull tax archives to bring an unprecedented historical perspective to the subject.

Six years after the financial crisis, “people are looking for a bible of sorts,” said Julia Ott, an assistant professor of the history of capitalism at the New School, who appeared on a panel with Mr. Piketty at New York University on Thursday. “He’s speaking to a real feeling out there that things haven’t been fixed, that we need to take stock, that we need big ideas, big proposals, big global solutions.”

“We are not experts in antitrust law, and this letter is not a legal brief. But we are authors with a deep, collective experience in this field, and we agree with the authorities in economics and law who have asserted that Amazon’s dominant position makes it a monopoly as a seller of books and a monopsony as a buyer of books.” (A monopoly is a company that has extraordinary control over supply as a seller of goods to consumers; a monopsony has extraordinary control over suppliers as a buyer of their goods.)

a highly unorthodox argument: that, even though Amazon’s activities tend to reduce book prices, which is considered good for consumers, they ultimately hurt consumers

U.S. courts evaluate antitrust issues very differently, nowadays, than they did a hundred years ago, just after antitrust laws were established to keep big corporations from abusing their power. Back then, judges tended to be largely concerned with protecting suppliers from being squeezed by retailers, which meant that, if a corporation exercised monopoly power to push prices down, hurting suppliers, the company could easily lose an antitrust case. But by the nineteen-eighties, the judiciary’s focus had shifted to protecting consumers, leading courts to become more prone to ruling in favor of the corporation, on the grounds that lower prices are good for consumers.

It isn’t just that we’ve lived one technological revolution among many; it’s that our technological revolution is the big social revolution that we live with

The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.

Robert K. Logan’s “The Sixth Language,” begins with the claim that cognition is not a little processing program that takes place inside your head, Robby the Robot style. It is a constant flow of information, memory, plans, and physical movements, in which as much thinking goes on out there as in here. If television produced the global village, the Internet produces the global psyche: everyone keyed in like a neuron, so that to the eyes of a watching Martian we are really part of a single planetary brain. Contraptions don’t change consciousness; contraptions are part of consciousness.

Reading, always a solitary affair, is increasingly a lonely one. A range of related factors have brought this to a head.

Overall book sales have been anemic in recent years, declining 6 percent in the first half of 2013 alone. But the profits of publishers have remained largely intact; in the same period only one of what were then still the “big six” trade houses reported a decline on its bottom line. This is partly because of the higher margins on e-books. But it has also been achieved by publishers cutting costs, especially for mid-list titles.

The “mid-list” in trade publishing parlance is a bit like the middle class in American politics: Anything below it is rarely mentioned in polite company. It comprises pretty much all new titles that are not potential blockbusters. But it’s the space where interesting things happen in the book world, where the obscure or the offbeat can spring to prominence, where new writers can make their mark.

ONE evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus.

All my life, reading books has been a deep and consistent source of pleasure, learning and solace. Now the books I regularly purchased were piling up ever higher on my bedside table, staring at me in silent rebuke.

Instead of reading them, I was spending too many hours online,

Whenever I was encouraged by my elders to pick up a book, I was often told, “Read so as to know the world.” And it is true; books have invited me into different countries, states of mind, social conditions and historical epochs; they have offered me a place at the most unusual gatherings.

But the most magical moments in reading occur not when I encounter something unknown but when I happen upon myself, when I read a sentence that perfectly describes something I have known or felt all along.

How many times, and in ways that did not seem to require my consent, have I suddenly and in my own bed found myself to be Russian or French or Japanese? How many times have I been a peasant or an aristocrat? How many times have I been a woman?

In Teaford’s case, the scouting evaluation was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, which was first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal.

Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become essential among many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staffs.

“Pretty much wherever I go, I’m bothering people, ‘Have you read this?’” said Mejdal, now an assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles.

an unusually large number of books about rationality were being published this year, among them Steven Pinker’s “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” (Viking) and Julia Galef’s “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t” (Portfolio).

When the world changes quickly, we need strategies for understanding it. We hope, reasonably, that rational people will be more careful, honest, truthful, fair-minded, curious, and right than irrational ones.

And yet rationality has sharp edges that make it hard to put at the center of one’s life

r ~~~-~st of us. There is almo-~t-n~ ~ wheth;~~ct~~l or imag'l ined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would [ make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.

From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture u~ertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century, no significant technologies were introduced that altered l-he form, volume, or speed of . in~. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press.

You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.

Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are

Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.