Reader Come Home Quotes

It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.

How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening--on a lucky day--without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

I still bought many books, but more and more I read in them, rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I a tired of being treated like a child. My father says it's because I am a child--I am twelve-and-a-half years old--but it still isn't fair. If I go into a store to buy something, nobody pays any attention to me, or if they do, it's to say, "Leave that alone," "Don't touch that," although I haven't done anything. My money is as good as anybody's, but because I am younger, they feel they can be mean to me. It happens to me at home, too. My mother's friend who comes over after dinner sometimes, who doesn't have any children of her own and doesn't know what's what, likes to say to me, "Shouldn't you be in bed by now,dear?" when she doesn't even know what my bedtime is supposed to be. Is there any way I can make these people stop? GENTLE READER: Growing up is the best revenge.

Deep reading is always about *connection*: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.

Before two years of age, human interaction and physical interaction with books and print are the best entry into the world of oral and written language and internalized knowledge, the building blocks of the later reading circuit.

...I think one shouldn't pussyfoot, and just say that you write the stuff that you would like to read. So you write for yourself, no doubt about that. But I do have a sort of romantic idea of someone in their twenties, of a certain bent, and when they pick up a book by me, they think--as I have done on several occasions--'Ah, here is one for me. Here is a writer who I'll have to read all of, because they're speaking directly to me, and they're writing what I want to read.' And sometimes you're doing the signing queue and a reader comes past and you sign the book, and there's a little exchange of the eyes, where you think, 'Ah, that's one of them.' So there is that ideal reader. And it's someone who's discovering literature and homes in on you. I'm aware of such readers.

Recounting the experience of individuals brings home, as nothing else can, the sheer complexity of the choices they had to make, and the difficult and often opaque nature of the situations they confronted. Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945. If they had known, doubtless the choices they made would have been different. One of the greatest problems in writing history is to imagine oneself back in the world of the past, with all the doubts and uncertianties people faced in dealing with a future that for the historian has also become the past. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing. These conditions included not only the historical context in which they lived, but also the way in which they thought, the assumptions they acted upon, and the principles and beliefs that informed their behavior. A central aim of this book is to re-create all these things for a modern readership, and to remind readers that, to quote another well-known aphorism about history, 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

A day or so before his death, Borges called Bioy from Geneva. Bioy said that he sounded infinitely sad. “What are you doing in Geneva? Come home,” Bioy said to him. “I can’t,” Borges answered. “And anyway, any place is good enough to die in.” Bioy said that in spite of their friendship, he felt, as a writer, hesitant to touch such a good exit line.

It is still a matter of amazement to me that what we know before we read any sentence prepares us to recognize even the visual shapes of the individual words faster and to understand their meanings more rapidly and more precisely in any new context.

To all of my young male readers: no means no. Nothing good comes from spending your hard-earned money on a “family home” that your wife doesn’t want. You are putting a down payment on discord and for years you will be paying off a mortgage of misery.

You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers.

In childhood, he declared, the word-rich get richer and the word-poor get poorer, a phenomenon he called the “Matthew Effect”41 after a passage in the New Testament. There is also a Matthew-Emerson Effect for background knowledge: those who have read widely and well will have many resources to apply to what they read; those who do not will have less to bring, which, in turn, gives them less basis for inference, deduction, and analogical thought and makes them ripe for falling prey to unadjudicated information, whether fake news or complete fabrications. Our young will not know what they do not know. Others, too. Without sufficient background

Today the sight that discourages book people most is to walk into a public library and see computers where books used to be. In many cases not even the librarians want books to be there. What consumers want now is information, and information increasingly comes from computers. That is a preference I can’t grasp, much less share, though I’m well aware that computers have many valid uses. They save lives, and they make research in most cases a thing that’s almost instantaneous. They do many good things. But they don’t really do what books do, and why should they usurp the chief function of a public library, which is to provide readers access to books? Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books’ own home: the library.

There is a very simple, very beautiful Native American story I have always remembered. In this story a grandfather is telling his young grandson about life. He tells the little boy that in every person there are two wolves, who live in one's breast and who are always at war with each other. The first wolf is very aggressive and full of violence and hate toward the world. The second wolf is peaceful and full of light and love. The little boy anxiously asks his grandfather which wolf wins. The grandfather replies, "The one you feed.

We have become so inundated with information that the average person in the United States now reads daily the same number of words as is found in many a novel. Unfortunately, this form of reading is rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated; rather, the average 34 gigabytes consumed by most of us represent one spasmodic burst of activity after another.

Wisdom, I conclude, is not contemplation alone, 28 not action alone, but contemplation in action.—John Dunne

What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world. These are stories without conclusions, but full of endurance and resilience. They are about human limitations, which means that the stories are not endings but beginnings, the beginning of the search for meaning rather than the end—and the power of resilience and endurance to carry one through to that meaning. Tevye, after grieving for his wife, daughter, and son-in-law and being expelled from his home, finally leaves the reader with a line that would never work on Broadway: “Tell all

The Bureaus of Prisons in states across America know this well; many of them project the number of prison beds they will need in the future based on third- or fourth-grade reading statistics.

There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the “friends” who inhabit them.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Should you tell your mother something if it is important when she is talking to company? I am six. GENTLE READER: Yes, you should (after saying "Excuse me"). Here are some of the things that are important to tell your mother, even though she is talking to company: "Mommy, the kitchen is full of smoke." "Daddy's calling from Tokyo." "Kristen fell out of her crib and I can't put her back." "There's a policeman at the door and he says he wants to talk to you." "I was just reaching for my ball, and the goldfish bowl fell over." Now, here are some things that are not important, so they can wait until your mother's company has gone home: "Mommy, I'm tired of playing blocks. What do I do now?" "The ice-cream truck is coming down the street." "Can I give Kristen the rest of my applesauce?" "I can't find my crayons." "When are we going to have lunch? I'm hungry.

The psychologist Howard Gardner used the MIT scholar Seymour Papert’s famous description of the child’s “grasshopper mind”6 to describe the spasmodic way our digital young now typically “hop from point to point, distracted from the original task.

…the act of reading is a special place in which human beings are freed from themselves to pass over to others and, in so doing, learn what it means to be another person with aspirations, doubts, and emotions that they might otherwise never have known.

I think my father is like the Holy Trinity with three people in him, the one in the morning with the paper, the one at night with the stories and the prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland.

hawing, let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dustbin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life, Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they don’t know what to say next. Then they come here, says the bird, and ask me what life is; Life, Life, Life! We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the wine-blue purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and dream there and see there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And he says (if sawings like his can be given a name so sacred and tender) Life’s labour, or so we interpret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet. And the ant agrees and the bees, but if we lie here long enough to ask the moths, when they come at evening, stealing among the paler heather bells, they will breathe in our ears such wild nonsense as one hears from telegraph wires in snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter, Laughter! the moths say. Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is — having asked them all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it was life’s meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is — alas, we don’t know.

Put in more sobering terms, only one-third of twenty-first-century American children now read with sufficient understanding and speed at the exact age when their future learning depends on it. The fourth grade represents a Maginot Line between learning to read and learning to use reading to think and learn. More disturbing altogether, close to half

No, this wasn’t a 1960s student riot. Out there were the streets. There were no nice dorms for sleeping. No school cafeteria for certain food. No affluent parents to send us checks. There was a ghetto riot on home turf. We already had our war wounds. So this was just another battle. Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That’s all. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or part existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era and we were the midwives.

I have often been asked why I maintained such a non-compromising antagonism to government and in what way I have found myself oppressed by it. In my opinion every individual is hampered by it. It exacts taxes from production. It creates tariffs, which prevent free exchange. It stands ever for the status quo and traditional conduct and belief. It comes into private lives and into most intimate personal relations, enabling the superstitious, puritanical, and distorted ones to impose their ignorant prejudice and moral servitudes upon the sensitive, the imaginative, and the free spirits. Government does this by its divorce laws, its moral censorships, and by a thousand petty persecutions of those who are too honest to wear the moral mask of respectability. In addition, government protects the strong at the expense of the weak, provides courts and laws which the rich may scorn and the poor must obey. It enables the predatory rich to make wars to provide foreign markets for the favored ones, with prosperity for the rulers and wholesale death for the ruled. However, it is not only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every individual value and quality. It is the whole complex of authority and institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth, pretense, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional domination. It is the reverence for these institutions instilled in the school, the church and the home in order that man may believe and obey without protest. Such a process of devitalizing and distorting personalities of the individual and of whole communities may have been a part of historical evolution; but it should be strenuously combated by every honest and independent mind in an age which has any pretense to enlightenment.

I was a reader, when I could get ahold of something to read, and literature showed me places I’d never seen. Another art form, though, showed me my own place: country music. Its sincere lyrics and familiar accent confirmed, with triumph and sorrow, that my home—invisible or ridiculed elsewhere in news and popular culture—deserved to be known, and that it was complicated and good.

The circumstances of her daily life, less usual now than fifty or a hundred years ago, were not conducive to an easy forgetting. While Delia and Felicity had been trained for careers, Elaine had been the one to stay at home. She might, if she had come upon them, have copied out Anne Elliot’s words, especially as she was the same age as Miss Austen’s heroine: ‘We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always business of some sort or other to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.’ But Elaine was not much of a reader; she would have said that she had no time, which was perhaps just as well, even if she missed the consolation and pain of coming upon her feelings expressed for her in such moving words.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a "republic for writers and readers" with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiner's imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released. What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer "invests his own being in the process of interpretation." Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not. Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art "embody an expository reflection which they pertain". In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. "The best readings of art are art." No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, "The fantasy I have sketched is only that." Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz.

Do you, my reader, read with less attention and perhaps even less memory for what you have read? Do you notice when reading on a screen that you are increasingly reading for key words and skimming over the rest? Has this habit or style of screen reading bled over to your reading of hard copy? Do you find yourself reading the same passage over and over to understand its meaning? Do you suspect when you write that your ability to express the crux of your thoughts is subtly slipping or diminished? Have you become so inured to quick précis of information that you no longer feel the need or possess the time for your own analyses of this information? Do you find yourself gradually avoiding denser, more complex analyses, even those that are readily available? Very important, are you less able to find the same enveloping pleasure you once derived from your former reading self? Have you, in fact, begun to suspect that you no longer have the cerebral patience to plow through a long and demanding article or book? What if, one day, you pause and wonder if you yourself are truly changing and, worst of all, do not have the time to do a thing about it?

The first is that students have become increasingly less patient with the time it takes to understand the syntactically demanding sentence structures in denser texts and increasingly averse to the effort needed to go deeper into their analysis. The second is that student writing is deteriorating. I have, to be sure, heard this criticism of undergraduates as long as I have been teaching. The question is nevertheless important for every age to confront. In our epoch, we must ask whether current students’ diminishing familiarity with conceptually demanding prose and the daily truncating of their writing on social media is affecting their writing in more negative ways than in the past.

Books, books, books! We can’t seem to get enough of them. A good book is like a friend waiting for you at home, providing comfort and familiarity alongside excitement and adventure. In contrast to “quick fix” diversions, a book lets the reader inside. You have time to get to know the character—her thoughts and secret yearnings—to live inside of a story, or to master a subject. Through a single book of nonfiction, you can obtain inside knowledge gleaned from a lifetime of experience. And through fiction, you can inhabit another life, another time, even another world. Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective.

But the period I studied -- the rollicking eighteenth century engraved by Hogarth -- was the one that saw the birth of America, of women's rights, and of the novel. The novel started as a low-class form, fit only to be read by serving maids, and it is the only literary form where women have distinguished themselves so early and with such excellence that even the rampant misogyny of literary history cannot erase them. Ever wonder about women and the novel? Women, like any underclass, depend for their survival on self-definition. The novel permitted this -- and pages could still be hidden under the embroidery hoop. From the writer's mind to the reader's there was only the intervention of printing presses. You could stay at home, yet send your book abroad to London -- the perfect situation for women. In a world where women are still the second sex, many still dream of becoming writers so they can work at home, make their own hours, nurse the baby. Writing still seems to fit into the interstices of a woman's life. Through the medium of words, we have hopes of changing our class. Perhaps the pen will not always be equated with the penis. In a world of computers, our swift fingers may yet win us the world. One of these days we'll have class. And so we write as feverishly as only the dispossessed can. We write to come into our own, to build our houses and plant our gardens, to give ourselves names and histories, inventing ourselves as we go along.

That is what I want our young nascent readers to become: expert, flexible code switchers -- between print and digital mediums now and later between and among the multiple future communication mediums....I conceptualize the initial development of learning to think in each medium as largely separated into distinct domains in the first school years, until a point in time when the particular characteristics of the two mediums are each well developed and internalized. That is an essential point. I want the child to have parallel levels of fluency, if you will, in each medium, just as if he or she were similarly fluent in speaking Spanish and English. In this way the uniqueness of the cognitive processes honed by each medium would be there from the start.

The central issue is not their intelligence, nor, more than likely, even their lack of familiarity with different styles of writing. Rather, it may come back to a lack of cognitive patience with demanding critical analytic thinking and a concomitant failure to acquire the cognitive persistence, what the psychologist Angela Duckworth famously called “grit,”54 nurtured by the very genres being avoided. Just as earlier I described how a lack of background knowledge and critical analytical skills can render any reader susceptible to unadjudicated or even false information, the insufficient formation and lack of use of these complex intellectual skills can render our young people less able to read and write well and therefore less prepared for their own futures.

Many people long to tell a story. Say to any group, “I write books,” and at least half will respond that, one day, they plan to write one, too. One day, when they have the time. One day, when they have the focus. Some have even started, though few have gotten past the first chapter, or the third, or the fifth. This isn’t meant as a judgment (the world needs far more readers than writers). I only mean to say that it is no small feat, to write a book. And if you want anyone to read said book, The End is only the beginning. Next, if one has opted to participate in traditional publishing, one must find an agent, a publisher. Then comes revision, sometimes one round, sometimes half a dozen, all to ready the text for an audience, to earn that place on the shelves of a bookstore, and then, a reader’s home.

In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences. In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions. This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal? The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? “Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

Rewriting the baseball record book must be very fulfilling. Or maybe not. Yankees outfielder Roger Maris knew firsthand the fickle nature of success. After an MVP season in 1960—when he hit 39 homers and drove in a league-high 112 runs—Maris began a historic assault on one of baseball’s most imposing records: Babe Ruth’s single-season home run mark of 60. In the thirty-three seasons since the Bambino had set the standard, only a handful of players had come close when Jimmie Foxx in 1932 and Hank Greenberg in 1938 each hit 58. Hack Wilson, in 1930, slammed 56. But in 1961, Maris—playing in “The House That Ruth Built”—launched 61 home runs to surpass baseball’s most legendary slugger. Surprisingly, the achievement angered fans who seemed to feel Maris lacked the appropriate credentials to unseat Ruth. Some record books reminded readers that the native Minnesotan had accomplished his feat in a season eight games longer than Ruth’s. Major League Baseball, due to expansion, changed the traditional 154-game season to 162 games with the 1961 season. Of the new home run record, Maris said, “All it ever brought me was trouble.” Human achievements can be that way. Apart from God, the things we most desire can become empty and unfulfilling—even frustrating—as the writer of Ecclesiastes noted. “Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income,” he wrote (5:10). “Everyone’s toil is for their mouth,” he added, “yet their appetite is never satisfied” (6:7). But the Bible also shows where real satisfaction is found, in what Ecclesiastes calls “the conclusion of the matter.” Fulfillment comes to those who “fear God and keep his commandments” (12:13).

The reader may ask me why I did not try to escape what was in store for me after Hitler had occupied Austria. Let me answer by recalling the following story. Shortly before the United States entered World War II, I received an invitation to come to the American Consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration visa. My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria. I suddenly hesitated, however. The question beset me: could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp? Where did my responsibility lie? Should I foster my brain child, logotherapy, by emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books? Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child, the child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them? I pondered the problem this way and that but could not arrive at a solution; this was the type of dilemma that made one wish for “a hint from Heaven,” as the phrase goes. It was then that I noticed a piece of marble lying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was a part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly I asked, “Which one is it?” He answered, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.” At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.

Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was not frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to the black chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginnings of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgement to my readers when they shall have learnt all.

Only in America do we ask our writers to believe they don't matter as a condition of writing. It is time to end this. Much of my time as a student was spent doubting the importance of my work, doubting the power it had to reach anyone or do anything of significance. I was already tired o hearing about how the pen was mightier than the sword by the time I was studying writing. Swords, it seemed to me, won all the time. By the time I found that Auden quote -- "poetry makes nothing happen" -- I was more than ready to believe what I thought he was saying. But books were still to me as they had been when I found them: the only magic. My mother's most common childhood memory of me is of standing next to me trying to be heard over the voice of the page. I didn't really commit to writing until I understood that it meant making that happen for someone else. And in order to do that, I had to commit the chaos inside of me to an intricate order, an articulate complexity. To write is to tell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have only seen in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this on, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other. When the writing works best, I feel like I could poke one of these words out of place and find the writer's eye there, looking through to me. If you don't know what I mean, what I mean is this: when I speak of walking through a snowstorm, you remember a night from your childhood full of snow, or from last winter, say, driving home at night, surprised by a storm. When I speak of my dead friends and poetry, you may remember your own dead friends, or if none of your friends are dead, you may imagine how it might feel to have them die. You may think of your poems, or poems you've seen or heard. You may remember you don't like poetry. Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine. All my life I've been told this isn't important, that it doesn't matter, that it could never matter. And yet I think it does. I think it is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it's the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing.

In “Internet of Stings,” Jennifer Howard began one of the more disconcerting essays about some of these issues that came up in interviews with one of the purveyors of false news: As one master of the fake-news genre told the Washington Post55: “Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore.” Separating truth from fiction takes time, information literacy, and an open mind, all of which seem in short supply in a distracted, polarized culture. We love to share instantly—and that makes us easy to manipulate. There are many tough issues here for students, teachers, parents, and the members of our republic. How our citizens think, decide, and vote depends on their collective ability to navigate the complex realities of a digital milieu with intellects not just capable of, but accustomed to higher-level understanding and analysis. It is no longer only a matter of which medium is better for what; it is a question of how the optimal mode of thought in our children and our young adults and ourselves can be fostered in this moment of history. These are hardly new thoughts either for

The Osage had been assured by the U.S. government that their Kansas territory would remain their home forever, but before long they were under siege from settlers. Among them was the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who later wrote Little House on the Prairie based on her experiences. “Why don’t you like Indians, Ma?” Laura asks her mother in one scene. “I just don’t like them; and don’t lick your fingers, Laura.” “This is Indian country, isn’t it?” Laura said. “What did we come to their country for, if you don’t like them?” One evening, Laura’s father explains to her that the government will soon make the Osage move away: “That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick.” Though, in the book, the Ingallses leave the reservation under threat of being removed by soldiers, many squatters began to take the land by force. In 1870, the Osage—driven from their lodges, their graves plundered—agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage. An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?

Belleville would have us believe that homeowners could bypass all the qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and, simply by virtue of having a church meet in their home, become overseers or elders. She would also have us believe that Lydia, who was a brand-new convert and who had just been baptized, became the overseer of the church at Philippi simply because she said to Paul, “come to my house and stay” (Acts 16:15). This claim is going far beyond the evidence in Scripture. The extra-biblical references that Belleville cites do not prove anything about homeowners having such a leadership role in the churches either.3 This claim is speculation with no facts to support it, and several factors in Scripture contradict it. But by making this unsubstantiated claim, Belleville leads readers to think that “Mary (Acts 12:12), Lydia (16:15), Chloe (1 Cor 1:11), and Nympha (Col 4:15)” were “overseers of house churches.”4 She leads readers to believe that several such women were overseers or elders. And so she makes these verses say something they do not say. This leads people to disbelieve or seek some way to explain away the passages that restrict the office of elder to men, and so it undermines the authority of Scripture. Therefore this claim takes another step on the path to liberalism.

Heart of Darkness also received a certain amount of notice from the first; and of its origins this much may be said: it is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all kinds of spoil. This story, and one other, not in this volume, are all the spoil I brought out from the centre of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business. More ambitious in its scope and longer in the telling, Heart of Darkness is quite as authentic in fundamentals as Youth. It is, obviously, written in another mood. I won’t characterize the mood precisely, but anybody can see that it is anything but the mood of wistful regret, of reminiscent tenderness. One more remark may be added. Youth is a feat of memory. It is a record of experience; but that experience, in its facts, in its inwardness and in its outward colouring, begins and ends in myself. Heart of Darkness is experience, too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck.

The story of The Rape of the Lock, sylphs and all, could have been told, though not so effectively, in prose. The Odyssey and the Comedy have something to say that could have been said well, though not equally well, without verse. Most of the qualities Aristotle demands of a tragedy could occur in a prose play. Poetry and prose, however different in language, overlapped, almost coincided, in content. But modern poetry, if it ‘says’ anything at all, if it aspires to ‘mean’ as well as to ‘be’, says what prose could not say in any fashion. To read the old poetry involved learning a slightly different language; to read the new involves the unmaking of your mind, the abandonment of all the logical and narrative connections which you use in reading prose or in conversation. You must achieve a trance-like condition in which images, associations, and sounds operate without these. Thus the common ground between poetry and any other use of words is reduced almost to zero. In that way poetry is now more quintessentially poetical than ever before; ‘purer’ in the negative sense. It not only does (like all good poetry) what prose can’t do: it deliberately refrains from doing anything that prose can do. Unfortunately, but inevitably, this process is accompanied by a steady diminution in the number of its readers. Some have blamed the poets for this, and some the people. I am not sure that there need be any question of blame. The more any instrument is refined and perfected for some particular function, the fewer those who have the skill, or the occasion, to handle it must of course become. Many use ordinary knives and few use surgeons’ scalpels. The scalpel is better for operations, but it is no good for anything else. Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can do; but this turns out to be something which not many people want done. Nor, of course, could they receive it if they did. Modern poetry is too difficult for them. It is idle to complain; poetry so pure as this must be difficult. But neither must the poets complain if they are unread. When the art of reading poetry requires talents hardly less exalted than the art of writing it, readers cannot be much more numerous than poets. The explication of poetry is already well entrenched as a scholastic and academic exercise. The intention to keep it there, to make proficiency in it the indispensable qualification for white-collared jobs, and thus to secure for poets and their explicators a large and permanent (because a conscript) audience, is avowed. It may possibly succeed. Without coming home any more than it now does to the ‘business and bosoms’ of most men, poetry may, in this fashion, reign for a millennium; providing material for the explication which teachers will praise as an incomparable discipline and pupils will accept as a necessary moyen de parvenir. But this is speculation.

They had her in Intensive Care. I sat outside Intensive Care in their slick little awful waiting room. They had red slippery chairs, cheap covering, and a stand full of pebbles with green plastic leaves growing up. I sat there hour after hour and read The Reader's Digest. The jokes. Thinking this is how it is, this is it, really, she's dying. Now, this moment, behind those doors, dying. Nothing stops or holds off for it the way you somehow and against all your sense believe it will. I thought about Mother's life, the part of it I knew. Going to work every day, first on the ferry then on the bus. Shopping at the old Red-and-White then at the new Safeway -- new, fifteen years old! Going down to the Library one night a week, taking me with her, and we would come home on the bus with our load of books and a bag of grapes we bought at the Chinese place, for a treat. Wednesday afternoons too when my kids were small and I went over there to drink coffee and she rolled us cigarettes on that contraption she had. And I thought, all these things don't seem that much like life, when you're doing them, they're just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you'll find yourself, then you'll find yourself, in life. It's not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, you're comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you're dying, Mother is dying, and it's just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you've had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O God doesn't it, you'd break your heart wanting back there.

Praise for THIS TENDER LAND “If you liked Where the Crawdads Sing, you’ll love This Tender Land by best-selling author William Kent Krueger. This story is as big-hearted as they come.” —Parade Magazine “If you’re among the millions who raced through Where the Crawdads Sing this year and are looking for another expansive, atmospheric American saga, look to the latest from Krueger.” —Entertainment Weekly “Rich with graceful writing and endearing characters… this is a book for the ages.” —The Denver Post “There are very few books (or movies, for that matter) that you can describe as ‘epic.’ But This Tender Land is just that.… This story will make you look at the world from a variety of viewpoints, as you watch these lost souls befriend one another in order to form their own unbreakable family unit.” —Suspense Magazine “[The characters’] adventures are heartstirring and their view of our complex nation, in particular the upper Midwest, is encyclopedic, if an encyclopedia could stir your heart as well as your brain.” —Sullivan County Democrat “Reminiscent of Huck and Jim and their trip down the Mississippi, the bedraggled youngsters encounter remarkable characters and learn life lessons as they escape by canoe down the Gilead River in Minnesota.” —Bookpage “Long, sprawling, and utterly captivating, readers will eat up every delicious word of it.” —New York Journal of Books “Krueger has crafted an American saga, epic in scope, a glorious and grand adventure that speaks of the heart and history of this country.” —Addison Independent (Vermont) “More than a simple journey; it is a deeply satisfying odyssey, a quest in search of self and home. Richly imagined and exceptionally well plotted and written, the novel is, most of all, a compelling, often haunting story that will captivate both adult and young adult readers.” —Booklist “Absorbing and wonderfully paced, this fictional narrative set against historical truths mesmerizes the reader with its evocations of compassion, courage, and self-discovery.… This Tender Land is a gripping, poignant tale swathed in both mythical and mystical overtones.” —Bob Drury, New York Times bestselling author of The Heart of Everything That Is “This Tender Land is a moving portrait of a time and place receding from the collective memory, but leaving its mark on the heart of what the nation has become.” —CrimeReads

On quitting Bretton, which I did a few weeks after Paulina’s departure—little thinking then I was never again to visit it; never more to tread its calm old streets—I betook myself home, having been absent six months. It will be conjectured that I was of course glad to return to the bosom of my kindred. Well! the amiable conjecture does no harm, and may therefore be safely left uncontradicted. Far from saying nay, indeed, I will permit the reader to picture me, for the next eight years, as a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass—the steersman stretched on the little deck, his face up to heaven, his eyes closed: buried, if you will, in a long prayer. A great many women and girls are supposed to pass their lives something in that fashion; why not I with the rest? Picture me then idle, basking, plump, and happy, stretched on a cushioned deck, warmed with constant sunshine, rocked by breezes indolently soft. However, it cannot be concealed that, in that case, I must somehow have fallen overboard, or that there must have been wreck at last. I too well remember a time—a long time—of cold, of danger, of contention. To this hour, when I have the nightmare, it repeats the rush and saltness of briny waves in my throat, and their icy pressure on my lungs. I even know there was a storm, and that not of one hour nor one day. For many days and nights neither sun nor stars appeared; we cast with our own hands the tackling out of the ship; a heavy tempest lay on us; all hope that we should be saved was taken away. In fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished. As far as I recollect, I complained to no one about these troubles. Indeed, to whom could I complain? Of Mrs. Bretton I had long lost sight. Impediments, raised by others, had, years ago, come in the way of our intercourse, and cut it off. Besides, time had brought changes for her, too: the handsome property of which she was left guardian for her son, and which had been chiefly invested in some joint-stock undertaking, had melted, it was said, to a fraction of its original amount. Graham, I learned from incidental rumours, had adopted a profession; both he and his mother were gone from Bretton, and were understood to be now in London. Thus, there remained no possibility of dependence on others; to myself alone could I look. I know not that I was of a self-reliant or active nature; but self-reliance and exertion were forced upon me by circumstances, as they are upon thousands besides; and when Miss Marchmont, a maiden lady of our neighbourhood, sent for me, I obeyed her behest, in the hope that she might assign me some task I could undertake.

He called back with an incredible report: there were people lined up around the store already. Wow, I thought. Wow! Wow didn’t begin to cover it. People lined up on two floors of the store to talk to Chris and get their books signed, hours before he was even scheduled to arrive. Chris was overwhelmed when he got there, and so was I. The week before, he’d been just another guy walking down the street. Now, all of a sudden he was famous. Except he was still the same Chris Kyle, humble and a bit abashed, ready to shake hands and pose for a picture, and always, at heart, a good ol’ boy. “I’m so nervous,” confided one of the people on the line as he approached Chris. “I’ve been waiting for three hours just to see you.” “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Chris. “Waitin’ all that time and come to find out there’s just another redneck up here.” The man laughed, and so did Chris. It was something he’d repeat, in different variations, countless times that night and over the coming weeks. We stayed for three or four hours that first night, far beyond what had been advertised, with Chris signing each book, shaking each hand, and genuinely grateful for each person who came. For their part, they were anxious not just to meet him but to thank him for his service to our country-and by extension, the service of every military member whom they couldn’t personally thank. From the moment the book was published, Chris became the son, the brother, the nephew, the cousin, the kid down the street whom they couldn’t personally thank. In a way, his outstanding military record was beside the point-he was a living, breathing patriot who had done his duty and come home safe to his wife and kids. Thanking him was people’s way of thanking everyone in uniform. And, of course, the book was an interesting read. It quickly became a commercial success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, including the publisher’s. The hardcover debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list, then rose to number one and stayed there for more than two months. It’s remained a fixture on the bestseller lists ever since, and has been translated into twenty-four languages worldwide. It was a good read, and it had a profound effect on a lot of people. A lot of the people who bought it weren’t big book readers, but they ended up engrossed. A friend of ours told us that he’d started reading the book one night while he was taking a bath with his wife. She left, went to bed, and fell asleep. She woke up at three or four and went into the bathroom. Her husband was still there, in the cold water, reading. The funny thing is, Chris still could not have cared less about all the sales. He’d done his assignment, turned it in, and got his grade. Done deal.

Reader's Digest (Reader's Digest USA) - Clip This Article on Location 56 | Added on Friday, May 16, 2014 12:06:55 AM Words of Lasting Interest Looking Out for The Lonely One teacher’s strategy to stop violence at its root BY GLENNON DOYLE MELTON  FROM MOMASTERY.COM PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN WINTERS A few weeks ago, I went into my son Chase’s class for tutoring. I’d e-mailed Chase’s teacher one evening and said, “Chase keeps telling me that this stuff you’re sending home is math—but I’m not sure I believe him. Help, please.” She e-mailed right back and said, “No problem! I can tutor Chase after school anytime.” And I said, “No, not him. Me. He gets it. Help me.” And that’s how I ended up standing at a chalkboard in an empty fifth-grade classroom while Chase’s teacher sat behind me, using a soothing voice to try to help me understand the “new way we teach long division.” Luckily for me, I didn’t have to unlearn much because I’d never really understood the “old way we taught long division.” It took me a solid hour to complete one problem, but I could tell that Chase’s teacher liked me anyway. She used to work with NASA, so obviously we have a whole lot in common. Afterward, we sat for a few minutes and talked about teaching children and what a sacred trust and responsibility it is. We agreed that subjects like math and reading are not the most important things that are learned in a classroom. We talked about shaping little hearts to become contributors to a larger community—and we discussed our mutual dream that those communities might be made up of individuals who are kind and brave above all. And then she told me this. Every Friday afternoon, she asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student who they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her. And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, she takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her, and studies them. She looks for patterns. Who is not getting requested by anyone else? Who can’t think of anyone to request? Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated? Who had a million friends last week and none this week? You see, Chase’s teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” Chase’s teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed by their peers. And she’s pinning down—right away—who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying. As a teacher, parent, and lover of all children, I think this is the most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered. It’s like taking an X-ray of a classroom to see beneath the surface of things and into the hearts of students. It is like mining for gold—the gold being those children who need a little help, who need adults to step in and teach them how to make friends, how to ask others to play, how to join a group, or how to share their gifts. And it’s a bully deterrent because every teacher knows that bullying usually happens outside her eyeshot and that often kids being bullied are too intimidated to share. But, as she said, the truth comes out on those safe, private, little sheets of paper. As Chase’s teacher explained this simple, ingenious idea, I stared at her with my mouth hanging open. “How long have you been using this system?” I said. Ever since Columbine, she said. Every single Friday afternoon since Columbine. Good Lord. This brilliant woman watched Columbine knowing that all violence begins with disconnection. All

Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of our attention? What concerns me as

When we reflect that “sentence”10 means, literally, “a way of thinking” . . . we realize that . . . a sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, a feelable thought. . . . It is a pattern of felt sense. —Wendell Berry

Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts?

There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests. Behind our screens, at work and at home, we have sutured the temporal segments of our days so as to switch our attention from one task or one source of stimulation to another. We cannot but be changed. And we are—

Our culture’s recipe would not be so much for forgetting, but for never remembering the same way in the first place: first because we are splitting our attention too much for our working memory to function optimally; and second, because we assume that in a digital world, we do not need to remember in the ways we remembered in the past. The current variation of Socrates’ worry is that our increased reliance on external forms of memory, combined with the attention-dividing bombardment by multiple sources of information, is cumulatively altering the quality and capacities of our working memory and ultimately its consolidation in long-term memory. And indeed there are some glum estimates that indicate that the average memory span of many adults has diminished by more than 50 percent over the last decade.38 We will need to vigilantly replicate such studies over time. But the chain does not end there.

Less happily, however, we are beginning to observe the direct and indirect influence of the digital word-spotting, text-grazing reading patterns of contemporary readers—how things are read—on how texts are being written. When publishers are forced to consider the needs

I worry that we are even closer to the stripping away of complex thoughts when they do not fit the memory-enfeebling restriction on the number of characters used to convey them.

From a reading researcher’s perspective or, surprisingly enough, from the perspective of a former president of the United States, the kind of “information” that Benjamin described does not represent knowledge. The journalist and writer David Ulin quoted a speech by Barack Obama to students at Hampton University in which he worried that for many of our young, information has become “a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment,20 rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.

From a very different perspective, in his thought-provoking essay “Losing Our Way in the World,” the Harvard physicist John Huth writes about the more universal importance of knowing where we are in time and space and what happens when we fail to connect the details of that knowledge into a larger picture. “Sadly, we often atomize knowledge32 into pieces that don’t have a home in a larger conceptual framework. When this happens, we surrender meaning to guardians of knowledge and it loses its personal value.

...before most of us possess an inkling that babies could be listening to us, infants are making astonishing connections between listening to human voices and developing their language system. Think how much more can happen in those regions when parents slowly, deliberately read to their children, *just to them*, with mutually focused attention. This disarmingly simple act makes huge contributions: it provides not only the most palpable associations with reading, but also a time when parent and child are together in a timeless interaction that involves shared attention; learning about words, sentences, and concepts; and even learning what a book is. One of the most salient influences on young children's attention involves the shared gaze that occurs and develops while parents read to them. With little conscious effort children learn to focus their visual attention on what their parent or caretaker is looking at without losing an ounce of their own curiosity and exploratory behaviors. As the philosopher Charles Taylor notes, "The crucial condition for human language learning is *joint* attention," which he and others who are involved in studying the ontogenesis of language consider one of the most important features of human evolution.

Increasing numbers of developmental researchers observe that when parents read stories on e-books with their children, their interactions frequently center on the more mechanical and more gamelike aspects of e-books, rather than the content and the words and ideas in the stories. Most parents are simply better at fostering language and helping to clarify concepts when they read physical books to their preschool children.

Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction . . . it returns us to a reckoning with time.2 —David Ulin

We seem to be moving as a society from a group of expert readers with uniquely personal, internal platforms of background knowledge to a group of expert readers who are increasingly dependent on similar, external servers of knowledge. I want to understand the consequences and costs of losing these uniquely formed internal sources of knowledge without losing sight of the extraordinary gifts of the abundant information now at our fingertips.

Within this millisecond of recollection, we begin to appreciate the multilayered beauty in the brain’s design for storing and retrieving words: each word can elicit an entire history of myriad connections, associations, and long-stored emotions. Indeed, you have just witnessed how the reading brain activates in half a second something akin to the daily efforts of poets and writers to find the perfect word, the mot juste,26 that will connect, as E. M. Forster once described it, “prose with passion.” Let us finish our tour of the reading brain

Rosetta stone, did not come from Iraq but from Iran, although it is Iraq that is the home of cuneiform writing. And this brings us to the story of the explorations and excavations leading to the decipherment of the cuneiform script and the rediscovery of the Mesopotamian civilizations. It will here be sketched only briefly-it has been told repeatedly and in detail during the past decades (see Bibliography for specific works)-in order to give the reader at least a glimpse into the picture as a whole

It is this heightened state that may produce several relatively new phenomena in childhood today. As the clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair,10 the author of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, observes, the most commonly heard complaint when children are asked to go off-line is “I’m bored.” Confronted with the dazzling possibilities for their attention on a nearby screen, young children quickly become awash with, then accustomed to, and ever so gradually semi-addicted to continuous sensory stimulation. When the constant level of stimulation is taken away, the children respond predictably with a seemingly overwhelming state of boredom. “I’m Bored.” There are different kinds of boredom. There is a natural boredom that is part of the woof of childhood that can often provide children with the impetus to create their own forms of entertainment and just plain fun. This is the boredom that Walter Benjamin described years ago as the “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”11 But there may also be an unnatural, culturally induced, new form of boredom that follows too much digital stimulation. This form of boredom may de-animate children in such a fashion as to prevent them from wanting to explore and create real-world experiences for themselves, particularly outside their rooms, houses, and schools. As Steiner-Adair wrote, “If they become addicted to playing on screens,12 children will not know how to move through that fugue state they call boredom, which is often a necessary prelude to creativity.” It would be an intellectual shame to think that in the spirit of giving our children as much as we can through the many creative offerings of the latest, enhanced e-books and technological innovations, we may inadvertently deprive them of the motivation and time necessary to build their own images of what is read and to construct their own imaginative off-line worlds that are the invisible habitats of childhood. Such cautions are neither a matter of nostalgic lament nor an exclusion of the powerful, exciting uses of the child’s imagination fostered by technology. We will return to such uses a little later. Nor should worries over a “lost childhood” be dismissed as a cultural (read Western) luxury. What of the real lost childhoods? one might ask, in which the daily struggle to survive trumps everything else? Those children are never far from my thoughts or my work every day of my life.

The University of Chicago historian Alison Winter24 wrote a thought-provoking history of the role of memory in the twentieth century. She argues that our cultural inventions such as film and tape recorders and computers have changed the tasks we place on our memory and, intriguingly, serve as powerful metaphors for explaining how memory works in any historical era. She asserts that most of us still believe that the “pictures” we retrieve from our memory are what they are without reference to the nature of the cameras that took them. In my expansion here of her thinking, I am hypothesizing that film both provides a helpful metaphor for explaining what may be occurring in a child’s working memory, and also may itself have become a physiological habit of mind for viewing anything upon a screen. The upshot would be less effective uses of various forms of memory in today’s children, but not necessarily unalterable changes, at least at the start of childhood. There is some support for this

Shared attention, as Charles Taylor wrote, is the beginning of the great dance of language that joins one generation to the next, not forced attention. Knowing research about the development of literacy is a very good thing; knowing what to attend to in one’s own child overrides everything I can ever say—or write—about any medium or any approach. There are so many things we all have

The medium is the messenger to the cortex, and it begins to shape it from the very start.

Like Frank Schirrmacher, the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin places such attention-flitting, task-switching behavior within the context of our evolutionary reflex, the novelty bias that pulls our attention immediately toward anything new: “Humans will work just as hard to obtain8 a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate. . . . In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain’s novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention. We need to train ourselves to go for the long reward, and forgo the short one.” Levitin wrote that passage in a book largely written for adult executives. His worthy lessons for adults, however, are magnified when considering young children. The child’s prefrontal cortex and the entire underlying central executive system have not yet learned the “rewards of sustained effort and attention,” much less the planning and inhibition that would allow a child to “forgo the short one.” In other words, switching between sources of attention for the child’s brain makes the perfect biological-cultural storm for adults look like a gentle downpour. With little prefrontal development on their side, children are completely at the mercy of one distraction after another, and they quickly jump from one “shiny new stimulus” to another. Levitin claims that children can become

editor and edited my first book in a wonderful way. For this book, however, time devoted to bringing up the children made a renewed editorial collaboration impossible. I hope the reader will not suffer unduly as a consequence! My children Christiana Dagmar and Eric James have watched me work on the book—indeed they could not avoid it as I often write at home. I hope they have been drawing the lesson that academic research can be really fun. Certainly, that is the lesson I drew from my father, Arthur von Hippel. He wrote his books in his study upstairs when I was a child and would often come down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. In transit, he would throw up his hands and say, to no one in particular, “Why do I choose to work on such difficult problems?” And then he would look deeply happy. Dad, I noticed the smile! Finally my warmest thanks to my MIT colleagues and students and also to MIT as an institution. MIT is a really inspiring place to work and learn from others. We all understand the requirements for good research and learning, and we all strive to contribute to a very supportive academic environment. And, of course, new people are always showing up with new and interesting ideas, so fun and learning are always being renewed! Democratizing Innovation 1  Introduction and Overview When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services—both firms and individual consumers—are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual

I think of Baghdad years ago, when I met Professor Al-Rawi for the first time to discuss The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his favorite book by his favorite American. He awarded me the task of reading it in the off-term, when the other students of English relaxed at home. Each day, I went to his office on the Karada campus and he explained to me things which I could not have possibly understood then. Truly, I did not comprehend a single thing at first. How Mark Twain wrote. How these Americans spoke, so ignorant and rough. Why Americans today thought of this story of terribly behaved children as high art. "Kateb, you must understand the context," Professor Al-Rawi said. "What the American reader knew then, what Americans today do not remember, and what you certainly cannot understand. These were not just boys making silly plans in caves. These were boys growing up just in time for their war. Sitting there, making plans to start this robber's gang, this was quite humorous to Americans reading the book in the nineteenth century." "But not Americans of today?" He lit a cigarette. "Humorous, yes. But for other reasons. You see, Americans today...forget. Ten years after these boys met to scheme in caves, their civil war fell upon them. These boys, these Missouri boys, they would have cut each other's throats in that war. And the sides they would pick? This was determined in their youth, you see." We were silent for a moment as I considered this. "Have you thought about Huck Finn cutting Tom Sawyer's throat?" he asked. "No." "You should, Kateb. You should think about that." Then he smiled, like he knew all along what would come for us.

How many there are who, in their old age, have lost their light and their joy! They were once burning and shining lights in the family, in the Sunday-school, and in the Church. But something has come in between them and God—the world or self—and their light has gone out. Reader, if you are one who has had this experience, may God help you to come back to the altar of the Savior’s love and light up your torch anew, so that you can go out into the lanes and alleys, and let the light of the Gospel shine in these dark homes.

You bring the stars, and I'll give you the moon. Plot holes in novels are like pot holes that damage your car. Don't leave any. I'm just another asshole with an opinion. Just because you hated a book, doesn't mean I didn't love it. I don't have time for fuckery. I'll always support an author, then the reader. I write to please me first. I'm that selfish & obnoxious. Only you can stand by your book. If you believe in it, be its cheerleader. The rest will come with time. Can't think of a word, make one up. Fantasy will always be my home. It's a place to escape the fuckery. When shit hits the fan, read a book. I'm human, and I make mistakes. I may never be one of the great writers, but at least I'm a damn good one. You want brutal honesty, don't ask me for my opinion. I will never be a literary great, but at least I can say that I had fun. What the world needs is a great story. No, it doesn't always have to be perfect. Give me errors, and I'll give you an author who is human. Yes, I'm arrogant enough to make up my own quotes. ;)

She ran her hands into Smith's wet hair, and he-- But why always Smith? Was it necessarily true, that because she seemed to HIM to be the ripe, round, straightforward antidote to the complications of his hopes, the scene looked as simple through her eyes? Was she not taking the greater risk here? Did she not have to set aside cautions, sorrows, hopes, fears, loyalties, to permit herself the role of the plump and ready siren in the steam-room? Have we not heard enough already of Mr. Smith's desire, and seen Mrs. Tomlinson quite sufficiently as he did? Should we not, at least, pay a little attention to Terpie's view of him, lounging like a freckly satyr on the wooden benches, grinning at her with a young man's lazy sense of entitlement now the surprise of her gift had faded; grown almost all the way into his strength but still long-limbed, with the knots of bone at his knees and his elbows giving him the lingering gawkiness of a foal; with the film of sweat on his chest, and his curls thickened to dark emphatic coils with water drops at the end; with the last unremoved traces of the paint around his eyes rimming his gaze in black depravity; with his wide mouth laughing, and his cock lolling? No, not lolling any more. Stirring, as she filled her hands with him, to her pleasure and his. The reader may imagine the occasional mismatches of desire or of endurance caused by their different ages. By the differences, at times in what followed, between twenty-four-year-old impetuousness and forty-six-year-old guile; between twenty-four-year-old muscles and forty-six-year-old backache. The reader may imagine, as she knelt on the bench en levrette--a technical term Terpie had learnt from a French gentleman, meaning with your bum in the air--that the pleasure of a boyish lover's deep wet rooting inside her did not entirely cancel the pinching of the skin of her knees between the wooden slats. And yet the two of them made for themselves, successfully, that little encompassing sphere of sensation which seems while it lasts to be, if not a home in the great world to be relied upon, at least a little world in itself, outside which not much matters, for a while. And yet, they arrived together, if not at rapture, then at those melting convulsions which come as close to it as you may, where gratitude and mutual greed are all you have to furnish the place of trust.

Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man’s essential nature—the keeping of the meditative thinking alive.” There is no shortage of contemporary observers of our digital culture who worry like Heidegger that the meditative dimension in human beings is threatened—by an overwhelming emphasis on materialism and consumerism, by a fractured relationship with time. As Teddy Wayne wrote in the New York Times: “Digital media trains us to be high-bandwidth8 consumers rather than meditative thinkers. We download or stream a song, article, book or movie instantly, get through it (if we’re not waylaid by the infinite inventory also offered) and advance to the next immaterial thing.” Or as Steve Wasserman asked in Truthdig, “Does the ethos of acceleration prized by the Internet diminish our capacity for deliberation and enfeeble our capacity for genuine reflection? Does the daily avalanche of information banish the space needed for actual wisdom? . . . Readers know . . . in their bones9 something we forget at our peril: that without books—indeed

Whether we are able to attend to our capacity for reflection in this epoch is a matter of personal choice, with critical implications for us as both individuals and citizens. John Dunne saw the loss of this dimension as related to the rise of violence and conflict. I regard its gradual loss more as an outcome of our milieu’s unforeseen sequelae—the constant need for efficiency: “buying time” without knowing for what purpose; decreasing attention spans, pushed beyond their cognitive limits by a flotsam of distractions and information that will never become knowledge; and the increasingly manipulated and superficial uses of knowledge that will never become wisdom. In the first half of the twentieth century,

لا شك أنني عندما كنت طفلة تتعلم القراءة، لم أفكر بالقراءة في حد ذاتها، لكنني مثل (أليس) ، قفزت ببساطة في جحر القراءة في بلاد العجائب وقضيت الشطر الأكبر من طفولتي هناك

The idea of duck hunting is to get up about the time that people who are having fun go to bed and get dressed in dirty flannels, itchy thermal underwear, muddy hip boots, clammy rain ponchos, and various other layers of insulation and waterproofing, then clamber, trudge, wade, paddle, stumble, flounder, and drag yourself miles into a swamp while carrying coolers, shell boxes, lunch buckets, flashlights, hand warmers, Buck knives, camp stoves, toilet paper, a couple of dogs, and forty or fifty imitation ducks, then sit in a wet hole concealed by brush cuttings and pine boughs until it’s dark again and you can go home. Meanwhile the weather will either be incredibly good, in which case the ducks will be flying in the clear sky thousands of feet above you, or incredibly bad, in which case the ducks will be landing right in front of you but you won’t be able to see them. Not that any actual ducks are required for this activity, and often none are sighted. Sometimes it’s worse when they are. The terrible thing about duck hunting is that everyone you’re with can see you shoot and see what you’re shooting at, and it is almost impossible to come up with a likely excuse for blasting a decoy in half.

By chance – but it is not by chance – I open the preface to the Veda of my friend and master and ask whoever will listen to me: What would you save from a house in flames? A precious, irreplaceable manuscript containing a message of salvation for the human race or a small number of people threatened by that fire? The dilemma is real and not only for the writer: how can one only be an ‘intellectual, interested in the truth, or only a ‘spiritual person’ engaged in goodness, when people desperately beg for food and justice? How can one follow a contemplative, philosophical or even religious path when the world requires action, commitment and politics? Vice versa, how can one act to make a better world or an indispensable revolution when what one needs is a serene intuition and a just evaluation? It should be clear to all who share life on our planet that the house in flames is not a fact that involves only one individual. Why was I created? Why, having been saved, do I still exist? How must I live and what can I do? My reader said: If I am not ready to save the manuscript from the fire, if I don’t take my intellectual vocation seriously, placing it before everything else – even at the risk of appearing inhuman –, then I am also incapable of helping people in a more serious and immediate manner. Vice versa, if I am not attentive and ready to save people from a outbreak of fire, which means, if I don’t consider my spiritual calling with total honesty, sacrificing all the rest for it, even my own life, then I will be incapable of saving the manuscript. If I let myself be involved in the solid problems of my times and if I don’t open my home to all of the winds of the world, then whatever I produce from an ivory tower will be sterile and cursed. Also, if I don’t close the doors and windows in order to concentrate on this work, I will not be able to offer anything of value to my neighbour. I hear each book on my shelves shouting in silence: In truth, the manuscript can come out of the flames charred and people burned, but the intensity of one preoccupation has helped me with the other. The dilemma is not to choose the monastery or the disco, Harvard or Chanakyapuri (the Vatican or the Quirinal), tradition or progress, politics or academia, the Church or the State, justice or truth. In a word, reality is not a matter of ‘either...or’, it is not a matter of choosing between spirit and matter, contemplation and action, written message and living persons, East and West, theory and approach or even between divine and human.1 My sense and destiny are inscribed in these words. I am a library, thus I exist in the world and thanks to men who have written, printed, bought and guarded my texts, I exist for them and in their world. I exist also because a man has existed. 1

Are we as a society beginning to lose the quality of attention necessary to give time to the essential human faculties that make up and sustain deep reading? If the answer is yes, what can we do?

Last Comforts” was born when one nagging question kept arising early in my journey as a hospice volunteer. Why were people coming into hospice care so late in the course of their illness? That question led to many others that rippled out beyond hospice care. Are there better alternatives to conventional skilled nursing home operations? How are physicians and nurses educated about advanced illness and end-of-life care? What are more effective ways of providing dementia care? What are the unique challenges of minority and LGBT people? What is the role of popular media in our death-denying culture? What has been the impact of public policy decisions about palliative and hospice care? The book is part memoir of lessons learned throughout my experiences with patients and families as a hospice volunteer; part spotlight on the remarkable pathfinders and innovative programs in palliative and late-life care; and part call to action. I encourage readers – particularly my fellow baby boomers -- not only to make their wishes and goals clear to friends and family, but also to become advocates for better care in the broader community.

What's real and what's not? People we meet in books--Holden Caulfield, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Bilbo and Gandalf and Frodo-- can become more memorable, and more important to us than people with birth certificates and drivers' licenses. Characters spawned in an author's imagination find a home inside us. They make our lives richer. They become our best friends. They never disappoint. And they never die.

Seen from this perspective, Luke-Acts becomes a paean of praise to the incomparable grace of God, lavished upon sinners. The thrust of this can only be grasped, and then only partially, if we see it against the background of the understanding of God at the time: omnipotent, terrifying, and inscrutable. He is not to be understood as a pleasant and innocuous God, who is always prepared to forgive even more than people are prone to sin (in the sense of Voltaire's contemptuous remark, “Pardonner, c'est son métier,” “to forgive is, after all, his profession”; cf Schweizer 1971;146). It is precisely as the omnipotent and inscrutable that he forgives—for the sake of Jesus. The initiative, throughout, remains God's (cf Wilckens 1963:183). And it manifests itself in ways that make no sense to the human mind. The prodigal son becomes the recipient of unfathomable and undeserved kindness; sinners are not only sought and accepted but receive honor, responsibility, and authority (Ford 1484:77). God answers the prayer of the tax-collector, not—as Jesus’ listeners have anticipated—that of the Pharisee. Salvation comes to a chief tax-collector, of all people, but only after Jesus has taken the initiative and invited himself to the house of Zacchaeus. A Samaritan—the most unlikely candidate imaginable-—performs an extraordinary deed of compassion. A contemptible criminal receives pardon and the promise of paradise in the hour of death, without any possibility of making restitution for his wicked deeds. The crucifiers of the innocent man from Nazareth hear him pray for forgiveness for what they are doing to him. And in Acts despised Samaritans and idol-worshiping Gentiles receive pardon and are incorporated into Israel, with whom they form the one people of God. What Jeremias said with reference to Jesus’ word that the tax-collector, rather than the Pharisee, went home “justified” (Lk 18:14), can be said about all the examples referred to above: “Such a conclusion must have utterly overwhelmed (Jesus’) hearers. It was beyond the capacity of any of them to imagine. What fault had the Pharisee committed, and what had the publican done by way of reparation?” (quoted in Ford 1984:75). The Jesus Luke introduces to his readers is somebody who brings the outsider, the stranger, and the enemy home and gives him and her, to the chagrin of the “righteous,” a place of honor at the banquet in the reign of God.

This story created a sensation when it was first told. It appeared in the papers and many big Physicists and Natural Philosophers were, at least so they thought, able to explain the phenomenon. I shall narrate the event and also tell the reader what explanation was given, and let him draw his own conclusions. This was what happened. A friend of mine, a clerk in the same office as myself, was an amateur photographer; let us call him Jones. Jones had a half plate Sanderson camera with a Ross lens and a Thornton Picard behind lens shutter, with pneumatic release. The plate in question was a Wrattens ordinary, developed with Ilford Pyro Soda developer prepared at home. All these particulars I give for the benefit of the more technical reader. Mr. Smith, another clerk in our office, invited Mr. Jones to take a likeness of his wife and sister-in-law. This sister-in-law was the wife of Mr. Smith's elder brother, who was also a Government servant, then on leave. The idea of the photograph was of the sister-in-law. Jones was a keen photographer himself. He had photographed every body in the office including the peons and sweepers, and had even supplied every sitter of his with copies of his handiwork. So he most willingly consented, and anxiously waited for the Sunday on which the photograph was to be taken. Early on Sunday morning, Jones went to the Smiths'. The arrangement of light in the verandah was such that a photograph could only be taken after midday; and so he stayed there to breakfast. At about one in the afternoon all arrangements were complete and the two ladies, Mrs. Smiths, were made to sit in two cane chairs and after long and careful focussing, and moving the camera about for an hour, Jones was satisfied at last and an exposure was made. Mr. Jones was sure that the plate was all right; and so, a second plate was not exposed although in the usual course of things this should have been done. He wrapped up his things and went home promising to develop the plate the same night and bring a copy of the photograph the next day to the office. The next day, which was a Monday, Jones came to the office very early, and I was the first person to meet him. "Well, Mr. Photographer," I asked "what success?" "I got the picture all right," said Jones, unwrapping an unmounted picture and handing it over to me "most funny, don't you think so?" "No, I don't ... I think it is all right, at any rate I did not expect anything better from you ...", I said. "No," said Jones "the funny thing is that only two ladies sat ..." "Quite right," I said "the third stood in the middle." "There was no third lady at all there ...", said Jones. "Then you imagined she was there, and there we find her ..." "I tell you, there were only two ladies there when I exposed" insisted Jones. He was looking awfully worried. "Do you want me to believe that there were only two persons when the plate was exposed and three when it was developed?" I asked. "That is exactly what has happened," said Jones. "Then it must be the most wonderful developer you used, or was it that this was the second exposure given to the same plate?" "The developer is the one which I have been using for the last three years, and the plate, the one I charged on Saturday night out of a new box that I had purchased only on Saturday afternoon." A number of other clerks had come up in the meantime, and were taking great interest in the picture and in Jones' statement. It is only right that a description of the picture be given here for the benefit of the reader. I wish I could reproduce the original picture too, but that for certain reasons is impossible. When the plate was actually exposed there were only two ladies, both of whom were sitting in cane chairs. When the plate was developed it was found that there was in the picture a figure, that of a lady, standing in the middle. She wore a broad-edged dhoti (the reader should not forget that all the characters are Indians), only the upper half of her

Advance Praise for THE GREAT NEW ORLEANS KIDNAPPING CASE: RACE, LAW, AND JUSTICE IN THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA "Michael Ross' The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case has all the elements one might expect from a legal thriller set in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Child abduction and voodoo. 'Quadroons.' A national headline-grabbing trial. Plus an intrepid creole detective.... A terrific job of sleuthing and storytelling, right through to the stunning epilogue." --Lawrence N. Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans "When little Mollie Digby went missing from her New Orleans home in the summer of 1870, her disappearance became a national sensation. In his compelling new book Michael Ross brings Mollie back. Read The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case for the extraordinary story it tells--and the complex world it reveals." --Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age "Michael Ross's account of the 1870 New Orleans kidnapping of a white baby by two African-American women is a gripping narrative of one of the most sensational trials of the post-Civil War South. Even as he draws his readers into an engrossing mystery and detective story, Ross skillfully illuminates some of the most fundamental conflicts of race and class in New Orleans and the region." --Dan T. Carter, University of South Carolina "The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is a masterwork of narration, with twists, turns, cliff-hangers, and an impeccable level of telling detail about a fascinating cast of characters. The reader comes away from this immersive experience with a deeper and sadder understanding of the possibilities and limits of Reconstruction." --Stephen Berry, author of House of Abraham: Lincoln and The Todds, a Family Divided by War "The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is such a great read that it is easy to forget that the book is a work of history, not fiction. Who kidnapped Mollie Digby? The book, however, is compelling because it is great history. As Ross explores the mystery of Digby's disappearance, he reconstructs the lives not just of the Irish immigrant parents of Mollie Digby and the women of color accused of her kidnapping, but also the broad range of New Orleanians who became involved in the case. The kidnapping thus serves as a lens on the possibilities and uncertainties of Reconstruction, which take on new meanings because of Ross's skillful research and masterful storytelling." --Laura F. Edwards, Duke University

Gospel renewal does not simply seek to convert nominal church members; it also insists that all Christians — even committed ones — need the Spirit to bring the gospel home to their hearts for deepened experiences of Christ’s love and power. In Paul’s great prayer for the Ephesians in chapter 3, he prays for his readers that Christ will dwell in their hearts and they may be filled with all the fullness of God. This is noteworthy, since he is writing to Christians, not nonbelievers. By definition, all Christians already have Christ dwelling in them (1 Cor 6:19; Col 1:27) and have the fullness of God (Col 2:9–10) by virtue of their union with Christ through faith (see sidebar on “A Biblical Theology of Revival” on pp. 58 – 59). What does Paul mean, then, by his prayer? He must be saying that he hopes the Ephesians will experience what they already believe in and possess — the presence and love of Christ (Eph 3:16–19). But how does this experience happen? It comes through the work of the Spirit, strengthening our “inner being” and our “hearts” so that as believers we can know Christ’s love (see v. 16). It happens, in other words, through gospel renewal.

What a howling wilderness is this world without our Lord! If once He hides Himself from us, withered are the flowers of our garden; our pleasant fruits decay; the birds suspend their songs, and a tempest overturns our hopes. All earth’s candles cannot make daylight if the Sun of Righteousness be eclipsed. He is the soul of our soul, the light of our light, the life of our life. Dear reader, what would you do in the world without Him when you wake up and look ahead to the day’s battle? What would you do at night when you come home jaded and weary if there were no door of fellowship between you and Christ? Blessed be His name, He will not leave us to face the struggle without Him, for Jesus never forsakes His own. Yet, let the thought of what life would be without Him enhance His preciousness.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention—a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits, but whose limits can be stretched.

Consider a conversation I had with a white friend. She was telling me about a "white) couple she knew who had just moved to New Orleans and bought a house for a mere twenty-five thousand dollars. "Of course," she immediately added, "they also had to buy a gun, and Joan is afraid to leave the house." I immediately knew they had bought a home in a black neighborhood. This was a moment of white racial bonding between this couple who shared the story of racial danger and my friend, and then between my friend and me, as she repeated the story. Through this tale, the four of us fortified familiar images of the horror of black space and drew boundaries between "us" and "them" without ever having to directly name race or openly express our disdain for black space. Notice that the need for a gun is a key part of this story--it would not have the degree of social capital it holds if the emphasis were on the price of the house alone. Rather, the story’s emotional power rests on why a house would be that cheap--because it is in a black neighborhood where white people literally might not get out alive. Yet while very negative and stereotypical representations of blacks were reinforced in that exchange, not naming race provided plausible deniability. In fact, in preparing to share this incident, I texted my friend and asked her the name of the city her friends had moved to. I also wanted to confirm my assumption that she was talking about a black neighborhood. I share the text exchange here: "Hey, what city did you say your friends had bought a house in for $25,000?" "New Orleans. They said they live in a very bad neighborhood and they each have to have a gun to protect themselves. I wouldn’t pay 5 cents for that neighborhood." "I assume it’s a black neighborhood?" "Yes. You get what you pay for. I’d rather pay $500,00 and live somewhere where I wasn’t afraid." "I wasn’t asking because I want to live there. I’m writing about this in my book, the way that white people talk about race without ever coming out and talking about race." "I wouldn’t want you to live there it’s too far away from me!" Notice that when I simply ask what city the house is in, she repeats the story about the neighborhood being so bad that her friends need guns. When I ask if the neighborhood is black, she is comfortable confirming that it is. But when I tell her that I am interested in how whites talks about race without talking about race, she switches the narrative. Now her concern is about not wanting me to live so far away. This is a classic example of aversive racism: holding deep racial disdain that surfaces in daily discourse but not being able to admit it because the disdain conflicts with our self-image and professed beliefs. Readers may be asking themselves, "But if the neighborhood is really dangerous, why is acknowledging this danger a sign of racism?" Research in implicit bias has shown that perceptions of criminal activity are influenced by race. White people will perceive danger simply by the presence of black people; we cannot trust our perceptions when it comes to race and crimes. But regardless of whether the neighborhood is actually more or less dangerous than other neighborhoods, what is salient about this exchange is how it functions racially and what that means for the white people engaged in it. For my friend and me, this conversation did not increase our awareness of the danger of some specific neighborhood. Rather, the exchange reinforced our fundamental beliefs about black people. (p. 44-45)

Reading is an act of contemplation…an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…it returns us to a reckoning with time. - David Ulin

Aristotle wrote that the good society has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment and the Greeks’ special relationship to leisure; and finally, the life of contemplation. So, too, the good reader.

Children are a sign. They are a sign of hope, a sign of life, but also a “diagnostic” sign, a marker indicating the health of families, society, and the entire world. Wherever children are accepted, loved, cared for and protected, the family is healthy, society is more healthy and the world is more human. - Pope Francis

Deep reading is always about connection: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.

the novelty bias that pulls our attention immediately toward anything new: “Humans will work just as hard to obtain8 a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate. . . . In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain’s novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention. We need to train ourselves to go for the long reward, and forgo the short one.