Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Want to Learn How to Think? Read Fiction

June 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
big-book

Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. Fortunately, new research suggests a simple antidote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction. A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and ... Read More

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Overwritten, Maybe, But Less Overwrought

March 20, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
American lit in the 20th century wasn't exactly known for its cheer.

There’s a widespread perception that we’ve gotten more touchy-feely over the past couple of generations—increasingly willing to express our emotions. If so, it’s not reflected in our writing. A new study finds that, in a large dataset of English-language books, the use of terms expressing six basic emotions steadily decreased over the course of the 20th century. “We believe the changes (in word usage) do reflect changes in culture,” writes the research team, led by anthropologist Alberto Acerbi of the University of Bristol. Writing in the online journal PLOS One, they ... Read More

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India, China, and the Importance of Storytelling

March 14, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Every time they fly in and out of Mumbai, tourists, businesspeople, and politicians can see blue-tarp and cardboard rooftops squeezed between condominiums and luxury hotels. The irony of Mumbai's slums is that the urban poor are ubiquitous, simultaneously visible and invisible. But seeing slums from the perspective of those who inhabit them — and not just an aerial view — is crucial to gaining real insight into a place. As UCLA historian Vinay Lal asks, “How else is one to understand a civilization and a particular junction in time?” Katherine Boo’s debut book, Behind the ... Read More

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Computer Determines If Torah Is Mosaic … or a mosaic

November 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In a marriage of traditional biblical scholarship and the latest in computerized textual analysis, a team of Israeli scholars has shed light on a long-simmering dispute over the authorship of the first five books of the Old Testament. The new technique supports a scholarly consensus that the Torah, traditionally attributed solely to Moses, is based on two primary sources. “It’s cool to be able to answer some of these millennia-old questions with cutting-edge 21st-century techniques,” says Idan Dershowitz, a graduate student in Biblical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ... Read More

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Dr. Seuss Analyzed for Political, Social Effects

March 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Of all the places he'd go in his wildly fertile imagination, Theodor S. Geisel — better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss — probably never dreamed he'd be referenced in the journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting. But the man who wrote a classic work of children's literature using a vocabulary of only 51 words (Green Eggs and Ham) would be amused to discover how many densely packed pages of academic prose are devoted to his work. Today, on the beloved author and illustrator's 107th birthday (which, as always, will be celebrated by the National Education Association as Read Across ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, March-April 2011, Research in Summary
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Memorable Stories of 2009

December 31, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

There seem to be two predominant methods of handing out awards, the democratic — say the People's Choice awards or those based on sales — or the oligarchic — like the Oscars or the Nobels. (I have no idea what the Grammys could possibly represent.) Given the lip service paid to democratic impulses around the globe, it's a trifle ironic that the awards most prized are those handed out by the oligarchs. This edition of Miller-McCune.com's top stories of the year takes that concept an important step further, from oligarchy to monarchy, which should really thrill the proles. Rather than ... Read More

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This Is Your Brain on Kafka

September 16, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

The befuddled tramps in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot are a poetic personification of paralysis. But new research suggests the act of watching them actually does get us somewhere. Absurdist literature, it appears, stimulates our brains. That's the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What's more, ... Read More

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Cracking the Case of Chekhov’s Ambiguity

January 27, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

As a birthday gift to Anton Chekhov, let's try and get the gist of his famous plays right in future adaptations by balancing his style with our sensibilities. On Thursday (Jan. 29), Russians will celebrate the birthday of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), most famous on these shores for four plays written at the end of his life: The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya. Chekhov's work remains a prominent — and mandatory — study in Russian schools and on its culture. Outside of Russia, Chekhov remains a popular yet mysterious puzzle many literary artists attempt to ... Read More

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The Nobel and Literature’s Third Rail

October 18, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy that awards the Nobel Prize in literature, startled American readers, authors and prize hopefuls a few weeks ago when he labeled the U.S. “too isolated, too insular.” We don’t translate enough foreign writers, he said; we don’t participate in the meaningful global dialogue in literature; and our authors are too sensitive to the plot lines of American mass culture. “That ignorance,” he concluded, “is restraining.” His critique, though, seemed to go beyond discussion of, say, Philip Roth’s Nobel worthiness to a ... Read More

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