Imagine the difference between enjoying a relaxing, sit-down meal and scarfing down a granola bar while riding the T to work. While many would prefer the former, sometimes we must sacrifice quality and enjoyment for practicality. But should we treat reading the same way? The folks over at The Indy thought the same thing in […]
March 19, 2017 at 10:59 pm
“Donald Trump doesn’t want you to go,” the title goes on, reminding us that it is actually not going where he wants some to go that is the real problem for those people. Hisham Matar at the New York Times shares an imaginative column with us in which he describes reading as getting to know […]
September 17, 2016 at 2:30 pm
“No, the Internet Has Not Killed the Printed Book. Most People Still Prefer Them,” Daniel Victor of the New York Times assures us in the title of his latest. And also invites us to ponder whether the slip in grammar might not indicate that the Internet has killed or made moribund something else: literacy. Citing […]
November 10, 2015 at 8:59 am
Snug within the book-bricked walls of a University, it may not seem that literacy is under threat. However, there is a great tradition of humanisticcommentators taking on the role of reminder to bid us keep in mind that literacy in its broadest conception is not just about the ability to decipher meaning out of written […]
March 23, 2015 at 10:30 am
The ease of publishing one’s writing online, in conjunction with the pleasure reading of popular fiction, may have changed our perception of the literary canon, says Arthur Krystal of The Chronicle Review. He fears a loss of appreciation for its greatness as new artists turn out works that will never have the same resonance as, say, a Shakespearean sonnet or a Homerian epic.
November 17, 2014 at 3:21 pm
Biologist Edward O. Wilson has spent his life studying evolutionary biology, writing books, and winning Pulitzer prizes, among other things. He is still going strong at 85 years old, and recently published “The Meaning of Human Existence,” a book intended to explain and convince the general public of the scientific theory of evolution. Drawing […]
The Core recently did a survey of syllabi in programs at other schools offering courses that are like Core in method and structure: primary texts, organized chronologically, giving students a working knowledge of the foundational works and ideas of our shared cultural heritage. While many of the books we saw on those other syllabi were […]
March 28, 2014 at 11:42 am
Prompted by Dean Sapiro’s lecture on Mary Wollstonecraft to question why there are so few women authors in the Core Humanities, Prof. David Green had his CC 202 students this week momentarily put aside Pride and Prejudice and the question of whether happiness in marriage is a matter of chance to consider the criteria for […]
October 8, 2013 at 11:44 am
Even the most erudite and cultured Core students and faculty have at some point in their lives been placed in a sticky situation where lying about having read a book is the easiest way out. A useful post from The Guardian gives us a study of the top ten books that people have pretended to […]
