Alan Jacobs

Reading Chekhov for a few minutes makes you better at decoding what other people are feeling. But spending the same amount of time with a potboiler by Danielle Steel does not have the same effect, scientists reported Thursday.

A striking new study found that reading literary fiction – as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction – leads people to perform better on tests that measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.

typetoy:

sugarmeows:

Cover for Fortune magazine, July 1953

(via skandalon)

In 1991 I spent a summer teaching at a seminary in the town of Igbaja in Kwara State, Nigeria. One weekend we took a long drive to visit a complex shrine-compound dedicated to the orisha Ọṣun. It was an eerie and fascinating experience. Recently, in unpacking from my move to Texas, I found some photographs I took of the compound. They were taken with a small point-and-shoot camera, and have faded a bit over the years, but I think they might still be of interest.

Update November 2017: I did not realize it when I first posted these photos, but this shrine is now a UNESCO World Heritage Center: the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove.

I’ve had to make political peace with SSM because it is a cultural juggernaut that makes sense by the standards of the mainstream today. I’m doing this not because I endorse SSM, but because as a conservative, my instincts toward prudence tell me that my energies would be better focused on figuring out how to protect religious liberty and ensure the vitality of traditional Christian teaching in a culture that embraces SSM. That can look like capitulation to some on my side, but I tell you, in a hypothetical in which social-conservative GOP radicals in Congress shut down the government down to get Obama to surrender on same-sex marriage, I could not in good conscience support my side. The destruction to the kind of political trust and shared understandings needed to govern in our system would not be worth anything plausibly gained by the shutdown.

What can you imagine Peyton Manning doing? Let’s build him an analogical world. You can imagine him wearing a short-sleeve button-down dress shirt. You can imagine him speed-typing numbers on an old-fashioned adding machine. You can imagine him lining up the corners on a pack of yellow legal pads. You can imagine him carrying coffee. You can imagine him researching lawn mowers. You can imagine him leaving early for work to take the station wagon in for a wax job and sliding Astral Weeks into the CD changer and watching the gray morning light settle on a street full of Dunkin’ Donuts and drive-through bank branches and thinking to himself, This is the time of day I like best.

It’s a cliché to note that he’s got some curious OCD tendencies — all that finger-licking under center, those rapid-fire Tourette’s bursts of audibles. What’s incredible is the cumulative effect 10,000 perfectly executed seven-yard reads have had over the years. At this stage in his late career, really for the whole season-plus he’s been with Denver, Manning makes being a midlevel IT manager look like a form of ruthless conquest. It’s as if he wrote a script to install automatic PC updates, and somehow it made him the god-emperor of hell. This is how he plays football: He goes out every week with a graphing calculator and a stack of forms, and he just audits teams to death.

thingsmagazine:

A Vintage Electric Data Time World Clock

thingsmagazine:

Aeronautics

Interviewer: What attracted you so much to Dick? Carrére: For me, he’s the Dostoyevsky of the twentieth century, the guy who understood it all. Actually, I am struck by his posthumous life—not only all the movies based on his books, but all the movies that aren’t, like The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Inception, that show reality disappearing behind its representation. It used to bother me that all these people didn’t admit their debt to Dick. But in the end, I think it’s great. WHat twenty years ago we called the world of Philip K. Dick is now just the world. We don’t need to cite him anymore. He’s won. [The Paris Review]

For all criticism is based on that equation: KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT. The key word here is meaningful. People who have strong reactions to a work—and most of us do—but don’t possess the wider erudition that can give an opinion heft, are not critics. (This is why a great deal of online reviewing by readers isn’t criticism proper.) Nor are those who have tremendous erudition but lack the taste or temperament that could give their judgment authority in the eyes of other people, people who are not experts. (This is why so many academic scholars are no good at reviewing for mainstream audiences.) Like any other kind of writing, criticism is a genre that one has to have a knack for, and the people who have a knack for it are those whose knowledge intersects interestingly and persuasively with their taste. In the end, the critic is someone who, when his knowledge, operated on by his taste in the presence of some new example of the genre he’s interested in—a new TV series, a movie, an opera or ballet or book—hungers to make sense of that new thing, to analyze it, interpret it, make it mean something.

I am so admiring and jealous of the fact that Greenwald can come up with new ways to say these things that are true and important and need to be said over and over. And he comes up with powerful arguments. And of course he broke the Snowden story, so he’s now become someone who has not just presented opinions, but who has really opened up new windows and doors and made things happen. But the character is thinking: what do well-formed, beautifully compressed opinions actually do when the people on the other side are not listening? Don’t you need people sitting down in the sidewalk? Don’t you need people getting arrested in front of the White House? In the few times that I’ve gone to protests, it’s always hit me that doing things or refusing to move has an expressiveness and directs the concentration in a way that a beautiful op-ed piece doesn’t. The powerlessness of words is what interests me, and what interests Paul. In the end, I’m writing a novel, so what am I saying? The powerless of words? I’m putting it all in a book. So I’m confused.