Category: Good Read

  • New Reading List

    I think I’ve found my summer reading list (yes, I’m thinking that far ahead).  The Chronicle of Higher Education asked a dozen scholars “what nonfiction book published in the last 30 years has most changed their minds.”  I’m especially interested in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (having themed a course on time and literature earlier this year and…

  • 14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature

    14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature You Can Read in the Time it Takes to Eat Lunch – Mic.

  • Skewered Britannia

    “Britannia, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl: skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape.  I am sufficiently behind the scenes to know the worth of political life.  I am quite an Infidel about it, and shall never be converted.” —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

  • Tomas van Houtryve Drone Essay Longest Ever Published by Harper’s

    If you can get your hands on this issue of Harper’s, please do. This photo essay is quite powerful and pushed me to think more deeply about the various uses of drones by the US. Harper’s Magazine is one of my favorite publications, and I’m so glad they devoted several pages to it.

  • Why People Should Read Fiction

    A writer at Forbes explains how reading fiction helps business leaders (and really, everyone) become more emotionally perceptive. She writes that “it seems that reading fiction improves your sensitivity to and appreciation of complex human situations; it provides a richer ‘toolkit’ of understanding from which to pull when making decisions and building relationships. And as…

  • Globalization

    GlobalizationThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good entry on globalization.  I love this resource because it has well-written and researched material, and it’s completely free!  We went over some of the material presented here, but you may want to read the full entry to get a better understanding of globalization and its history.  It might…

  • Happy birthday, Eudora!

    Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi.  She wrote some of my favorite works of fiction and some of my favorite essays about fiction.  In “Must the Novelist Crusade?” she writes, “What distinguishes [fiction] above all from the raw material, and what distinguishes it from journalism, is that inherent in the…

  • Why the ‘Hipster’ Generation-Y Africa Movement Must Evolve

    This is a really good article by Jonathan Kalan on my generation and the issues surrounding foreign aid.