You just can’t expect kids to sit down and open a volume of the encyclopedia like we did back in the day. Many have probably never even seen one.
“Media and information comes so quickly on the internet, and they are texting all the time,” Steinberg said. “They are used to getting things in compact, quick ways.”
Tech-addled adults are not immune to the curse of the shortened attention span. Unless I am deeply engaged in a subject, I no longer have the patience for those overly long New Yorker stories. That teetering pile of unread books on my nightstand could kill me in an earthquake. How did it get so tall? Because I used to read novels until I got sleepy. Now I snuggle with my iPhone.
In a national park a four-hour drive north of Sydney in Australia, a fire is smoldering out of control – and it's been doing so for at least 6,000 years.
Known as 'Burning Mountain', the mysterious underground blaze is the oldest known fire on the planet. And some scientists estimate it may be far more ancient than we currently think.
As readers of Ernest Hemingway know, war can be a powerful aphrodisiac. In her book Love in a Time of War: My Years With Robert Fisk, the French American foreign correspondent Lara Marlowe tells the autobiographical story of two reporters and their intense and stormy love affair against the rough and dangerous background of war.
Their love story spans decades, skipping across the Middle East and Balkans while the two report, argue, and love—in short, live life to the fullest. They drink, write, and interview war lords against a backdrop of front-line battles—when they aren’t taking a break in Paris or Dublin. The couple were part of a journalistic tribe then called “firemen,” reporters sent at a moment’s notice by their media organizations to cover a hot spot. In a sense, the book is two things in one: a memoir of Marlowe’s journalistic career and a poignant tribute to a man she loved and revered.
I am not enjoying the pandemic, but I did enjoy Finch's articulate take on life in the midst of it. Missing his friends and mourning the world as he knew it, Finch's account has a unifying effect in the same way that good literature affirms humanity by capturing a moment in time. As Finch chronicles his routines honestly and without benefit of hindsight, we recall our own. Events of the past year and a half were stupefying and horrific — but we suffered them together.
Gavin Francis has written excellent books on the specifics of the human body – Adventures In Human Being, for example – and recently on the pandemic with Intensive Care. This new book could not be more timely, as it deals with the other side of illness. It is brief, useful and written with his customary blend of case study and literary precedent. As he states at the outset, “The medicine I was trained in often assumes that once a crisis has passed, the body and mind find ways to heal themselves – there’s almost nothing more to be said on the matter. But after nearly twenty years as a GP I’ve often found that the reverse is true: guidance and encouragement can be indispensable. Odd as it seems, my patients often need to be granted permission to take the time to recover that they need”.
Like Samuel Johnson (good for 110 quotes here), who chose only the “best writers” to provide his dictionary’s usage examples, such were the foundations of these long-established tomes. You were on predictable, solid (but also stolid) ground with each. The workhorses did their job, growing ever-more tattered, ever less contemporary, but no matter. They gave and you were happy to receive.
Before prising keel worms off the backs of mussels,
we have to tap them with a knife, when good sense, fear,