Category: Miscellaneous

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The Writing Tool That Mark Twain, Agatha Christie and James Joyce All Swore By

A notebook is a record of both solitude and connection. It’s a place for making real the quiet, flickering thoughts that otherwise might pass unnoticed, where words and sketches can stumble and fail. In a notebook, failure is less consequential because it’s not failure at all; it’s a necessary part of the messiness of exploration, of letting the unknown and the uncertain find form. Read more

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Two Horror Authors on the Scary Books You Should Read

Halloween is just around the corner, so we turned to two great horror authors — Joe Hill (“The Fireman,” “NOS4A2”) and Stephen Graham Jones (“The Only Good Indians,” “My Heart Is a Chainsaw”) — for their recommendations of books to read this season. Read more

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We Now Know What May Have Caused the Salem Witch Trials

The 15th through 17th centuries saw a wave of “witch hunts” break out across the Western world: the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts, the 1428 Valais Hexen hunts in what is now Switzerland, and the myriad persecutions in Scotland and Ireland after the passage of the Witchcraft Acts of 1563 and 1586 (respectively) are only a few of the many witchcraft-related uproars that plagued Europe and America.

The idea of witches had been present in folklore all the way back to the time of the ancient Romans. But a persecution on this scale hadn’t occurred before across nations. What could have prompted these 300 years of deadly witch hunts? A new study published in the journal Theory and Society seems to have pinpointed the source of this outbreak of witchcraft panic. And as it turns out, the culprit for the deadly craze is none other than Johannes Gutenberg. No, the famed German inventor was not some master of the occult. But his most notable invention, the printing press, is what helped the massive spreading of a new theory of witchcraft in the 15th century, according to this study.

One particularly damaging mass-produced book—a text called Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1487 by Heinrich Kramer, a Dominican friar—reshaped how the Western world saw the practice of witchcraft. As the study writes, this new line of thinking “depicted witchcraft as conspiratorial activity against godly society and not simply mischief by village sorceresses, pagans, or ignorant peasants.”

More than just crafting a conspiracy theory, Malleus Maleficarum—which translates to “The Hammer of Evil-Doers”—also served as “the first printed guide for witch-hunters” Read more

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The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time. Read more

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