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Jessica Love writes for The American Scholar about some recent psychological studies on the art and perspective of storytelling. Of particular interest is the way "the first person does seem to encourage us to identify with the narrator, especially when that narrator is a lot like us." Not that identifying with narrators is the primary purpose of reading, as the New Yorker reminds us in a piece against "relatability,"  but it's something to consider the next time you pick up a novel and find a character who seems to be just like you.

Having grown up in Russia, New Republic senior editor Julia Ioffe is in a uniquely good position to cover the Sochi Olympics, which is why she’s writing regular dispatches from this year’s Winter Games. On Saturday, she published a piece about one of the sadder (yet more predictable) developments of the Games: foreign journalists are bombarding gay residents of Sochi with questions and requests for interviews. (She’s also manning the magazine’s Instagram feed.)

“He combed through the sahaflar, the second-hand bookshops that line the streets around the Grand Bazaar, their dusty wares stacked on haphazard tables. He sat by the New Mosque, drinking tea out of tulip-shaped cups, playing backgammon, and watching the fishermen’s wooden boats launch into the dirty waters of the Golden Horn.” For Public Books, Suzy Hansen writes about James Baldwin's less-well-documented time in Istanbul. Pair with this piece from our pages about the famed author, race, and fatherhood.