Twenty six percent of adults in the United States have not read even a portion of a book within the last year. It’s an unfortunate reality considering that researchers have found that consuming the written word is exceptionally good for people. Here’s what studies have found.
Reading fiction helps you be more open-minded.
It’s because the same brain regions are activated when you experience something in real life as when you get into the heads of characters and imagine walking in their shoes. Researchers have actually found that this practice of seeing the world from the perspectives of others helps people be more empathetic and better understand different ways of thinking.
A nation plagued by a wrenching loop of mass school shootings watched the latest horror play out in this small Southeast Texas town Friday morning, as a young man armed with a shotgun and a .38 revolver smuggled under his coat opened fire on his high school campus, killing 10 people, many of them his fellow students, and wounding 10 more, the authorities said.
By the end of the day, a 17-year-old suspect, Dimitrios Pagourtzis — an introvert who had given off few warning signs — had surrendered and been taken into custody. Law enforcement officials said they found two homemade explosive devices left at the school during the rampage.
It was the worst school shooting since the February assault on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where a young man with an AR-15 rifle left 17 people dead and prompted a wave of nationwide, student-led protests calling on lawmakers to tighten gun laws.
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At least 10 people are dead after a school shooting in Santa Fe, Tex.
By NEETI UPADHYE, SARAH STEIN KERR and ROBIN LINDSAY on Publish Date May 18, 2018. Photo by Stuart Villanueva/The Galveston County Daily News, via Associated Press. Watch in Times Video »
An aging airliner crashed Friday shortly after takeoff on a domestic flight in Cuba, officials and Cuban news media reported, leaving more than 100 people dead in an accident that highlighted the precarious state of the country’s commercial aircraft fleet.
The plane, a Boeing 737-200 leased by state airline Cubana de Aviación from a small Mexican carrier and operated by a Mexican crew, went down in a field within a couple of miles of Havana’s José Martí International Airport. There were conflicting accounts of the exact number of people on board; Cuban media reported that as many as 105 passengers were listed, plus up to nine foreign crew members.
The Cuban state-run newspaper Granma did not immediately provide a death toll but said that only three people survived the crash, which occurred at 12:08 p.m. Eastern time. It said the three were hospitalized in critical condition. The paper said that apart from the crew and about five foreign passengers, the people on board were Cuban citizens.
I’ve got a great idea for a start-up. Want to hear the pitch?
It’s called the 75 Cent Dollar Store. We’re going to sell dollar bills for 75 cents — no service charges, no hidden fees, just crisp $1 bills for the price of three quarters. It’ll be huge.
You’re probably thinking: Wait, won’t your store go out of business? Nope. I’ve got that part figured out, too. The plan is to get tons of people addicted to buying 75-cent dollars so that, in a year or two, we can jack up the price to $1.50 or $2 without losing any customers. Or maybe we’ll get so big that the Treasury Department will start selling us dollar bills at a discount. We could also collect data about our customers and sell it to the highest bidder. Honestly, we’ve got plenty of options.
Tom Wolfe, the author whose groundbreaking and radiant journalism helped create a new genre of nonfiction in books like “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and “The Right Stuff,” has died. He was 88.
Wolfe’s death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit.
Wolfe, always impeccably attired and often spotted strolling around New York City in his signature white three-piece suit, was one of the leading practitioners of so-called New Journalism, a style that fused novelistic flair with traditional reporting.
He chronicled the social upheavals of America, immersing readers in everything from the California hippie counterculture to the space race. He peppered his writing with gleeful punctuation and memorable phrases — coining era-defining expressions like “radical chic” and “the Me Generation.”
On March 15, some time ago, several dozen famous politicians—sturdy men, duly elected senators who claimed to love their republic—attacked their chief executive while he walked into the Senate. They stabbed Gaius Julius Caesar 23 times, as he fell to the floor, defenseless, and bled to death, setting off a chain of wars that formally ended the Roman Republic and initiated the Roman Empire.
Some 2,062 years have passed since that day, but we haven’t stopped arguing about it. From Central Park productions of Julius Caesar to op-ed accusations of “Caesarism,” the Roman dictator—and the world he inhabited—still looms in our political conversation. Even the architecture of Washington, D.C., suggests that it is a kind of New Rome.
But for all those years, the source material for the arguments have remained largely the same. Archaeologists can locate new sites and excavate for coins, plates, or jewelry; scholars can read and reread Roman writers like Cicero, Sallust, and Catullus, who all documented Caesar. These have been the techniques for learning about Rome for centuries, and they are indispensable. But lately, they have been joined by something new.
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Oskari Porkka / Gilmanshin / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic
A teacher and student on a field trip were killed Thursday when a school bus collided with a dump truck and flipped over in Mount Olive Township in New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said.
More than 40 others were injured, some critically, and were taken to local hospitals, Murphy told reporters. The truck driver was also being treated at a hospital.
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The names of the teacher and student killed in the Interstate 80 crash were not released.
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“It’s a tough day here in Paramus,” Bergen County Executive Jim Tedesco told reporters. “Sixty-five years I’ve lived in this town and it’s difficult to stand here today to talk about our education community suffering so deeply.”
An eruption from the Kilauea volcano’s summit shot ash and smoke into the air early Thursday on Hawaii’s Big Island, and the resulting plume is expected to cover the surrounding area, according to the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
The volcanic cloud reached 30,000 feet, the US Geological Survey said. That’s a little below the cruising altitude of a jetliner.
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“At any time, activity may again become more explosive, increasing the intensity of ash production and producing ballistic projectiles near the vent,” the USGS said. “Ballistic projectiles may be produced should steam-driven explosions occur. Impacts will be limited to an area around Halemaumau.”
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Halemaumau is the crater within Kilauea’s summit caldera.
Los Angeles startup Local Roots retrofits 40-foot-long shipping containers, turning them into “TerraFarms” that yield as many leafy greens as five acres of farmland—only faster, using as little as 1 percent of the water.The company leases TerraFarms to wholesalers, restaurant chains, and SpaceX. The United Nations is preparing to field-test them, too. Chief Executive Officer Eric Ellestad, a venture capitalist who’s raised about $11 million for Local Roots, says he’ll stand by the taste of the greens grown in the former containers, no salad dressing required. “Chefs we work with,” he says, “that’s what sells them.”
He was reading chapter books and could string together a story about the Pokemon sitting on his shoulder who didn’t need a seatbelt because he could just fly into the air if we got into a collision—yes, he could use words like collision accurately—and he loved to learn and discover and invent things.
But he would NOT write three sentences a day in his “journal” for his first grade teacher
Every night, the same routine:
Me: What can you write in your journal?
Him: I don’t want to.
Me: It’s just three sentences. What happened today? Just write anything.
Him: dawdle dawdle dawdle …no writing…
Me: *threats of time out, no TV, ranting about how this should have taken 5 minutes but it’s already been 30, why won’t you just do it?*
Yeah, I have better skills than that, but sometimes I forget to use them.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Daily Habit of Reading Books
Cuba plane crash
Tom Wolfe
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“TerraFarm”
