What does your brain look like when you read a Jane Austen novel? One group of Stanford researches is using an MRI machine to find out.
This is Your Brain on Austen
The New Republic’s New Reader
The New Republic, which was recently acquired by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, has started a super clean, neat little news reader.
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But Then Again, Who Wouldn’t Be?
I’m not that into ballet, but if I had to be, I’d be into 1,000 frame-per-second footage of German ballet dancers prancing around to a dance-y remix of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.”
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Wrapping Things Up
What if the next crisis to hit the headlines brings an end to the world as we know it? It’s a mind-bending thing to contemplate, but it’s what our own Emily St. John Mandel tackles in Station Eleven, which made it up to the final five of last year’s National Book Awards. On a new episode of The Takeaway, Emily talks about the novel, exploring what’s left when civilization withers away. You could also read our interview with Emily about the book.
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Doomed Love on Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day may be all about happy couples, but the most memorable love stories in literature are tales of doom, from Oedipus to Romeo and Juliet to the many dysfunctional partnerships that populate contemporary literature. The Guardian offers a literary lovers’ quiz for the lovelorn.
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From the Dept. of Whaaa?
Mystery author James Patterson has written a novel called The Murder of Steven King that apparently describes the eponymous author’s death at the hands of a deranged fan. While King declined to comment on the book, he has in the past said of Patterson that the latter is “a terrible writer but he’s very successful.” And now you must read our editor-in-chief Lydia Kiesling’s essay, “Everything I Know About America I Learned from Stephen King.”
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Burning Libraries
An arsonist broke into the University of Missouri’s Ellis Library, but Robert Long Foreman‘s dismayed for more than that reason.