Why Fiction is Good for You

Is fiction good for us? We spend huge chunks of our lives immersed in novels, films, TV shows, and other forms of fiction. Some see this as a positive thing, arguing that made-up stories cultivate our mental and moral development. But others have argued that fiction is mentally and ethically corrosive. It’s an ancient question: Does fiction build the morality of individuals and societies, or does it break it down?

http://articles.boston.com/2012-04-29/ideas/31417849_1_fiction-morality-happy-endings

 

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

By KEVIN HARTNETT

This past winter I wrote a pair of essays about The Brothers Karamazov that included the admission that I preferred “Tolstoy’s ability to see the angles of everyday life to Dostoevsky’s taste for the manic edges of experience.”  That line elicited more of a reaction from readers than anything else I wrote, which prompted me to dive deeper into the question: Just which of these two titans of Russian literature is considered the greater novelist?

http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/tolstoy-or-dostoevsky-8-experts-on-whos-greater.html

 

Woody Allen’s Top Five Books

The director writes about the books that have made most impact on him as a film-maker and comic writer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/06/woody-allen-top-five-books

 

Its Even Less in Your Genes – Book Review of ‘The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture’

Richard C. Lewontin

The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture by Evelyn Fox Keller
[Duke University Press]

In trying to analyze the natural world, scientists are seldom aware of the degree to which their ideas are influenced both by their way of perceiving the everyday world and by the constraints that our cognitive development puts on our formulations. At every moment of perception of the world around us, we isolate objects as discrete entities with clear boundaries while we relegate the rest to a background in which the objects exist.

That tendency, as Evelyn Fox Keller’s new book suggests, is one of the most powerful influences on our scientific understanding. As we change our intent, also we identify anew what is object and what is background. When I glance out the window as I write these lines I notice my neighbor’s car, its size, its shape, its color, and I note that it is parked in a snow bank. My interest then changes to the results of the recent storm and it is the snow that becomes my object of attention with the car relegated to the background of shapes embedded in the snow. What is an object as opposed to background is a mental construct and requires the identification of clear boundaries. As one of my children’s favorite songs reminded them:

You gotta have skin.
All you really need is skin.
Skin’s the thing that if you’ve got it outside,
It helps keep your insides in.

Organisms have skin, but their total environments do not. It is by no means clear how to delineate the effective environment of an organism.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/26/its-even-less-your-genes/?pagination=false

 

Adam Kirsch Reviews Sera L. Young’s New Book “Craving Earth: Understanding Pica”.

If dirt, as William James put it, is matter out of place, then the dirtiest dirt of all is the kind you put where you’re absolutely not supposed to: in your mouth. We teach children not to eat dirt even before they can talk; conversely, telling someone to eat dirt is a powerful expression of contempt, a way of demoting them from human to animal. Yet as Sera L. Young explains in her quirkily informative book Craving Earth: Understanding Pica, eating dirt—in particular, certain kinds of dry, crumbly clay, as well as other non-food substances like uncooked starch, chalk, and ice—is a very widespread human practice, and always has been. Pica, as this behavior is known—the name comes from the Latin word for “magpie”—is especially common among pregnant women.

This has been recognized since ancient times: Hippocrates, the 5th-century BC Greek physician, noted that pregnant women often had cravings for earth or charcoal, and a classic Indian poem describes a pregnant queen who “set her heart upon clay in preference to all other objects of taste.” Today, Young reports, Americans with pica buy boxes of chalk at Walmart, or bags of ice (the cubes at the Sonic fast-food chain seem to be especially popular), or even order prime Georgia dirt over the Internet.

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Craving-Earth/ba-p/4601