Category: How To Read

  • The Loss of the “Literary Man”

    The headline is simple but does what it can to rattle the alarms: The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone. The author spends a lot of the essay pointing out how the numbers and proportions of male/female students, writers, readers, etc. have changed over the decades. Yes, duh. They’ve dropped across the board. Oh,…

  • Why Kids Can’t Read

    I have no patience for podcasts. I leave it to my wife to decide what gets listened to on long road trips (or, in the winter, when a 1,000 piece puzzle is littered all over the dining table). During our drive back from Savannah, where we spent the week of Thanksgiving and adopted our darling…

  • Riffs on: Reading Well

    The current reality: reading isn’t a priority. When newspapers were still a stalwart of our cultural hegemony, even they were written at a 7th grade reading level. After all, everyone needs to know the news. I far the average reading level is far less than that. There is the story about the woman suing because…

  • The path to better brains

    Write more. All the time. See what your thoughts look like on paper. Writing by hand conditions fine motor control. This can help with everything from improving synapse connections to properly fingering your partner to orgasm. Read better. Learn to read a text deeply and thoroughly. Ideally, spend large amounts of time with novels published…

  • Teens Will Do Whatever It Takes To Not Read William Faulkner

    And it is true that children are annoying. But I do think that all these hysterical stories that people love to circulate to prove that the younger generation is doomed because of wokeness, illiteracy, pro-Palestinian politics or whatever, overlook one very important fact: teens will do whatever it takes not to read William Faulkner. -Jessica…

  • The Lost Art of Reading

    Some notes and such from David L. Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading

  • I Won’t Like It

    It’s not that I think pop culture creates sub-par stuff. It’s how we’re asked to perceive popular culture that steps on the significance it could have. We’re not asking questions or critiquing it – we’re just giving it a thumbs up/down and then moving on to the next thing.

  • I Forgot How To Read

    Teaching someone how to read is akin to teaching someone how to write – after a certain point, there’s nothing else to teach.