Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The People You Meet in Games Are Often Real Friends The image of the solitary gamer — isolated, headset on, unresponsive to the physical world — has been remarkably persistent given how thoroughly it...
Read article →Why Reading Fast Is Mostly a Trap Speed reading has been sold as a life-changing skill since at least the 1950s, when Evelyn Wood's Reading Dynamics courses promised to teach executives to absorb book...
Read article →Reading as Medicine: A Serious Look at a Contested Claim The idea that reading literature can heal emotional wounds is old enough to be carved in stone — literally. Above the entrance to the library a...
Read article →What Poems Can Do That Other Therapy Cannot Poetry therapy is not, as it might sound to the skeptical ear, a fringe practice invented by people who failed to get their verse published. It has institut...
Read article →What Sleep Science Says About Ending the Day With a Book The ritual of reading before bed is old enough that most people who do it have never questioned whether it works. It simply feels right — the s...
Read article →What Putting In Your Earbuds Actually Does to Your Workout The playlist is loaded, the tempo is set, and somehow the last mile of a run that would otherwise feel endless becomes almost manageable. Mos...
Read article →How Complex Novels Might Train the Way You Read Other People Theory of mind — the ability to attribute mental states to others, to understand that people have beliefs, desires, and intentions that dif...
Read article →The Quiet Ritual That Turns Out to Be Surprisingly Good for You Most people who sing alone do so carefully. In the car with the windows up. In the shower before anyone else is awake. At the stove, sof...
Read article →Reading vs Listening: What the Evidence Actually Resolves The audiobook has become a genuinely popular format, and with it has come a genuinely popular anxiety: does listening to a book count as reall...
Read article →The Comfort in Going Back There is a particular kind of reader who, when faced with a new stack of unread books, reaches instead for a worn paperback they have already read three times. Non-readers so...
Read article →Why That Song Won't Leave Your Head You're standing in line at the grocery store, and suddenly it's there again. The same eight bars, looping without your permission, demanding your mental real estate...
Read article →There is a specific line from a song I heard during one of the harder years of my life that still does something to me when it comes through whatever I am listening on. The line is not particularly im...
Read article →Why Book Clubs Create Bonds That Outlast the Books There is something that happens in long-running book clubs that goes well beyond discussing plot. Members who have met monthly for years will often s...
Read article →The Empathy Question: What Reading Fiction Does and Does Not Do The claim is appealing in its tidiness: reading literary fiction makes you more empathetic. It shows up in op-eds, in arguments for huma...
Read article →The question of whether to work in silence or to work with music playing has generated enough opinion and enough bad advice to fill several productivity books. The correct answer, frustratingly, is th...
Read article →There is a specific experience that most people recognize and almost no one can fully explain: you hear a song you have not thought about in years, and within a few seconds you are somewhere else. Not...
Read article →Stand in the crowd at a concert — a large one, the kind where the stage is too far away to see the performer's face clearly and you are experiencing the music primarily as vibration and collective sou...
Read article →The question is not difficult to pose: why do people listen to sad music when they are sad? It appears, at first glance, like a form of self-harm — choosing stimuli that will amplify or sustain a nega...
Read article →Music therapy has a branding problem. The phrase calls up images that range from the plausibly medical to the obviously implausible — hospital wards with harp players, wellness retreats with singing b...
Read article →I keep a running playlist called Slow Down that I have added to for about six years. It has Bon Iver and Nick Drake and a few things I am almost embarrassed to admit to. I put it on when I am moving t...
Read article →If you step back and think about it plainly, dystopian fiction asks readers to voluntarily inhabit futures where everything has gone wrong. The governments are authoritarian, the environment is ruined...
Read article →The first time I watched a film with subtitles and forgot I was reading them, something had shifted. The story was moving fast enough that the cognitive labor of the text disappeared, and I was simply...
Read article →The horror film audience is a specific kind of person: they pay to be scared, they seek out sensations that most self-preservation instincts would classify as threats, and they generally leave the the...
Read article →I have watched every season of a competitive cooking show that I will not name, and I can tell you the precise moment I felt genuinely worried about a contestant I had known for approximately forty mi...
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