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What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?

What’s awkward about this whole debate is that, though we speak freely of “attention spans,” they are not the sort of thing that psychologists can measure, independent of context, across time. And studies of the ostensible harm that carrying smartphones does to cognitive abilities have been contradictory and inconclusive. Read more

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How a Book About Bees Scandalized Europe


On July 8, 1723, a book was put on trial. The Grand Jury of Middlesex County Court, in England, was presented with a work that corrupted public morals to such an extent that it might “debauch the nation.” Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees was said to recognize no evidence of God’s influence or providence in the world; it attacked all the decent institutions of society — politicians were derided, the clergy were slandered, and universities mocked; and, most offensive of all, it attempted to “run down religion and virtue as prejudicial to society, and detrimental to the state … and to recommend luxury, avarice, pride, and all kind of vices, as being necessary to public welfare.” The book claimed that vice ought to be pursued because the immoral activities of individuals can generate an overall economic benefit for society as a whole. Vice was not only necessary but desirable. Like Milton’s Lucifer, its author seemed to declare: “Evil, be thou my Good.” Read more

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How Historical Fiction Redefined the Literary Canon

“A historical novel has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 12 out of the last 15 years, and historical fiction has made up 70 percent of all novels short-listed for these three major American prizes since the turn of the 21st century. Today, writers like Colson Whitehead, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, and Hernan Diaz are less interested in the way we live now than the way we were.

But this generation of prize-winning novelists is different from their forebears in another major way—they’re a lot less white. American literature’s overwhelming turn toward the historical past has both motivated, and been motivated by, the increasing recognition of Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous writers in the literary field. Over the past five decades, writers of color have been celebrated, prized, and canonized almost exclusively for the writing of historical fiction: narratives of war, immigration, colonialism, and enslavement that span generations and honor previously disregarded histories. Of the top 10 most-taught novels by writers of color published after 1945, eight are works of historical fiction. Of the 54 novels by writers of color to be short-listed for a major American prize between 1980 and 2010, all but four are works of historical fiction. Read more

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Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour?

Blinkist is an app. If I had to summarize what it does, I would say that it summarizes like crazy. It takes an existing book and crunches it down to a series of what are called Blinks. On average, these amount to around two thousand words. Some of the books that get Blinked are gleamingly new, such as “Leading with Light,” by Jennifer Mulholland and Jeff Shuck, which was published in March; other books are so old that they were written by people whose idea of a short-haul flight involved feathers and wax. In the realm of nonfiction alone, more than six and a half thousand works have been subjected to the Blinkist treatment. Across all platforms, there have been thirty-one million downloads on the app. Right now, there will be somebody musing over Blinks of “Biohack Your Brain,” “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” or “The Power of Going All-In,” which is, I am sorry to report, yet another study of successful leadership. Given the title, I was hoping that it might be about breakfast buffets, or the best way to behave yourself at an orgy. Read more

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