Reading an academic journal article is not like reading a novel. It is not like reading a blog post. It is a completely different activity. A novel invites you in. A blog post gives you its point quickly. An academic paper, by contrast, is a fortress. It is dense, written in a specialized code, and […]
What is life? For millennia, this question was the domain of priests, philosophers, and poets. It was a question of “spirit,” of a “vital spark,” of a “ghost in the machine.” Then, in the middle of the 20th century, a new group of thinkers took over. They were physicists, chemists, and biologists, and they approached […]
We are drowning in words. We read more today than at any other point in human history. We scroll through articles. We skim headlines. We digest hot takes, social media posts, and endless comment threads. Our brains, rewired by the digital age, have become incredibly efficient at one specific skill. Skimming. We have trained ourselves […]
Some books are entertainment. Some are information. A very small few are dynamite. They don’t just add to what you know; they change how you know it. They are philosophy books that change worldviews by locating the hidden assumptions you live your life by the very foundations of your “common sense” and putting a metaphorical […]
What makes a biography “great”? The simple answer is “accuracy.” A good biography, we assume, is one that gets all the facts right. It has the correct dates, the verified quotes, the detailed footnotes. This answer is true, but it is incomplete. It is the answer for a historian, not a reader. A simple collection […]
Why do we still read them? This is a question that echoes through classrooms and book clubs. Why do we bother with books written 50, 100, or 200 years ago, by authors who are long dead? The world has changed. We have the internet. We have immediate, global communication. We have new problems, new technologies, […]
For every new author, the dream is the same. It is the moment of holding a finished, physical book in your hands. It is the smell of the paper, the weight of the object, the sight of your name on the cover. It is a dream of validation and completion. But between the final period […]
We have a problem. We are all failing a test we don’t even know we’re taking. The test is the internet. The subject is “truth.” And the people failing the hardest are, paradoxically, the “smartest” ones. For our entire lives, we have been trained in a specific, “academic” way of reading. We were taught to […]
Does reading make you smarter? The simple, reflexive answer is “yes.” It’s a piece of received wisdom we’ve all internalized. We are told to “read more” in the same way we are told to “eat our vegetables.” We know it’s good for us, but the specific reasons remain abstract. What does “smarter” even mean? If […]
On the surface, the difference seems simple. One genre has spaceships and aliens. The other has dragons and elves. Science Fiction, we are told, is about the future, and Fantasy is about the past. This is a shallow analysis. And it is wrong. This “aesthetic” definition one of props and settings collapses immediately under any […]
Becoming a first-year university student involves a series of new, confusing, and often expensive decisions. None is more immediate or frustrating than your first trip to the campus bookstore. You are handed a list of required texts for your five new classes, and the total at the bottom of the receipt could easily fund a […]
What makes a novel “modern”? The word itself is a trap. Does “modern” mean new? Does it mean it was written in our lifetime? Or does it refer to a specific, explosive period in art (capital ‘M’ Modernism) that shattered every rule it could find? We believe it’s all three. The “modern novel” isn’t just […]
