Every year, reading becomes a new and fresh experience. Each new volume offers us the opportunity to grow in knowledge, enjoyment, and (hopefully) empathy. As we age, different sorts of books offer different remedies for what ails us: an escape from trouble, perhaps, or a respite from the daily grind. We might crave the [...]
This summer and fall, we’ve talked a lot about the decline of civility in our politics—because of growing political polarization, bickering on social media, and rudeness in public spaces. “Every day rudeness, disrespect and hostility sideline collaboration and compromise,” the National Institute for Civil Discourse writes on their website. “Sound bites replace sound journalism. Extremes [...]
It only took a moment. The smartphone was somewhere in the grass, forgotten. Our hands and jeans were covered in smears of purple and green sidewalk chalk. My two-year-old daughter and I were busy drawing roads and buildings on a square of pavement—here a library, there a post office, with our house around the corner. [...]
Literature is delightful. It’s wondrous, exciting, and often terrifying fun. It offers us escape without the cost of a plane ticket, adventure without deadlines or endpoints. It’s spontaneous and soul-searching, lengthy and pointed, poignant and hilarious... College is full of books: textbooks and biographies, encyclopedias and novels, history books and essays. You finish your Epic of [...]
Is dating on the verge of extinction? In an article featured in their latest September magazine, Vanity Fair addresses* the fearful world of Tinder—and the toll it’s taking on traditional sorts of courtship: Hookup culture, which has been percolating for about a hundred years, has collided with dating apps, which have acted like a wayward [...]
What happens when we enter a world of constant connection—a world in which technology infiltrates nearly every moment of our waking existence? “We all feel the porcupine quill of constant contact, the irritant of ever presence, and long to escape, if only for a moment,” Rabbi David Wolpe writes for TIME Magazine. But Wolpe [...]
An increasing number of Americans are looking to social media and online dating sites like Tinder or OKCupid to meet potential romantic partners. In a Friday column, David Brooks reviews the data presented by the book Dataclysm, written by the creator of OKCupid: People who date online are not shallower or vainer than those [...]
Some people like cooking. Others don’t—indeed, some would be happy to guzzle Soylent and throw the whole cooking thing out the window. Yet many of us, as we grow older, become responsible for others: children, friends, and family members who may come over for dinner or who may live with us. Cooking isn’t a [...]
Dear Mr. Dawkins, You’ve said lately that fairy tales are quite harmful. Your reason for thinking this is simple, and true: you told attendees at the Cheltenham Science Festival, “I think it’s rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism … Even fairy tales, the ones we [...]