Category: words

“Narrative fiction offers a rich context in which exposure to out-group culture and (a process of emotional) merging can occur,” the researchers conclude. “Supporting this notion, there is growing evidence that reading a story engages many of the same neural networks involved in empathy.”

“The basic idea is that every word you say represents a choice. So when you speak, you’re making a million choices that you’re not aware of. The differences aren’t meaningful to the speaker.” But they are meaningful to a program that can catalogue and index all the possible options.

For his short story collection Tenth of December, “Saunders, a former Guardian columnist, became the first winner of the £40,000 Folio prize, an award created by people in the books industry who felt frustrated by what they see as the shortcomings of the Man Booker.”

“On Monday the company announced that up to 24 writers, chosen from a pool of applicants, will be given a round-trip ticket on a long-distance train, including a private sleeper-car room with a bed, a desk, and electrical outlets. The trains promise the romance. The writers will have to do the rest.”

“It has been called intelligent self-help, but since most potential readers would not appreciate the implied association with the dumber varieties, “smart thinking” has a certain advantage.”

“This is, in many respects, a key part of the LRB’s ethos: it provides a space in which intelligent people can think differently; in which discomfiting thoughts can be voiced and provoking arguments can be aired with enough room to breathe.”

“The way media is changing isn’t entirely positive when it comes to creating a more informed citizenry. Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase depth of understanding, while also creating a level playing field that encourages ideas that come from anywhere?”

“Ted Kaczynski was not improved by his obsession with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, nor Timothy McVeigh by his fascination with The Turner Diaries. Mark David Chapman was not healed by his love of The Catcher in the Rye. The disturbed reader—or, in my case, the merely immature reader—won’t always be ennobled simply by cracking open a great book.”

“Nobody who’s ever been online would be surprised that comments can get nasty. But book reviews are new ground for this fight. Reviews are one of the only places where saying whether you don’t like the thing you’re discussing is kind of the point.”

“Hirst will be neither the first author nor the last to invent portions of his memoirs. In fact, it’s pretty unfair to expect to anyone to really remember their own life particularly accurately, without going around scribbling on their body like Guy Pearce in Memento.”