Monk

I don't know who Joel Stein is, but maybe I should start reading him. He has a great bit on adults reading fiction meant for children and young teens.

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The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.” Or a Twilight book. Or Harry Potter. The only time I’m O.K. with an adult holding a children’s book is if he’s moving his mouth as he reads.

I’m sure all those books are well written. So is “Horton Hatches the Egg.” But Horton doesn’t have the depth of language and character as literature written for people who have stopped physically growing.

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I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud. I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.

-- Joel Stein at The New York Times

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For the record, I am not putting down any e-buddies who are really getting into "The Hunger Games" or have loved "Harry Potter". Whatever works, I always say. But I thought this was a nice piece.

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To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

-- Stanley Fish for The New York Times

Humanities may be a good in itself, but that is not going to bring more money into the enterprise. Rather like me life.

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We may be on the cusp of a new revolution in reading, at least in reading online text, by having the text reformatted in a way that is more compatible with the natural movement of the eye, letting narrow lines cascade down the page, called Live Ink.

When our ancestors first invented written language about 5,000 years ago, they unfortunately didn’t have armies of neuroscientists standing by to tell them block type was the wrong way to format their papyrus rolls. But fret not. Help is on the way.

Walker Reading Technologies’ CEO and co-founder, Randall Walker MD, believes he and his team have developed a solution with a product called Live Ink that allows online publishers to improve reading speed and comprehension. Live Ink works by analyzing written language for meaning and language structure, and then applies algorithms that reformat the text into a series of short, cascading phrases. It breaks complex syntax into simpler syntax, which makes it easier for the brain to absorb the material.

They have some studies that show that students have improved their reading performance with it. Funny, it looks like my idea of poetry.


(Source: Mark Coker for VentureBeat.com)

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