Read Literary Fiction; Become a Better Person →

Pam Belluck, writing for the New York Times' 'Well' blog: 

[a study published Thursday in Science] found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.

She goes on to write: 

The idea that what we read might influence our social and emotional skills is not new. Previous studies have correlated various types of reading with empathy and sensitivity. More recently, in a field called “theory of mind,” scientists have used emotional intelligence perception tests to study, for example, children with autism.
 
But psychologists and other experts said the new study was powerful because it suggested a direct effect — quantifiable by measuring how many right and wrong answers people got on the tests — from reading literature for only a few minutes.

Good thing my debut novel, Whitney, which comes out tomorrow, is literary fiction. Buy it; read it; watch your life improve. 

/via Lifehacker 

Arcade Fire-Games Without Frontiers (Peter Gabriel Cover)

Arcade Fire-Games Without Frontiers (Peter Gabriel Cover)

From Peter Gabriel's And I'll Scratch Yours.

/via Songs That Don't Suck

Subtle But Genius Wordplay

Rock Genius:

When translated from French, the lines read:

Between the night, night and dawn.
Between the kingdoms, of the living and of the dead.
 
There is a subtle, but genius, wordplay between “la nuit” (the night) and “l'ennui” (boredom) here. This digital, reflective age, staring at screens, is a purgatory — a metaphor to represent the ambivalence and boredom of human life in the digital age.
 
We are living, but not really living; communicating with each other, but not really communicating; experiencing life through digital images, YouTube videos and live streams instead of actually going out and living it.
 
This once again could be a reference to the myth about Orpheus and Erydice. (The record cover depicts Rodin’s statue of the unfortunate lovers.)

 Rap Genius (and now Rock Genius, Poetry Genius, and News Genius) is one of the three or four main reasons why the Internet continues to exist.

1:1 Reflektor

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/via @arcadefire 

The History of the New York Yankees Logo

Richard Morgan, writing for The New York Times' City Room blog:

Here’s the thing: I love the Yankees’ logo, but couldn’t care less about the team. It’s not that I object to a $1.85 billion franchise with a $230 million opening-day payroll. And I’m not a Mets or Red Sox fan. I just don’t care all that much about baseball. 
 
But, that logo. This is not where I segue into some screed on graphic design, gushing about serifs or kerning. The logo is just flat-out quintessential, distilled, pure New York.

Really interesting piece, both from a sports perspective and a design perspective.

 /via Brand New

F. Scott Fitzgerald Advises His 11 Year-Old Daughter

Josh Jones, writing for Open Culture: 

Amidst all the glamorization of his best and worst qualities, it’s easy to forget that Fitzgerald was also the father of a daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, who went on to have her own successful career as a writer. Unlike the children of some of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries, Frances thrived, which must be some testament to her father’s parenting (and to Zelda’s as well, though she allegedly hoped, like Daisy Buchanan, that her daughter would become a “beautiful little fool”).

Fitzgerald's letter to Frances while she was at summer camp is just perfect, especially the conclusion of his "Do/Don't"  list of things to worry about:

How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

BornYet: A Delightfully Easy Birth Announcement Service

Here's how simple BornYet is: you register for a subdomain through the site and your friends sign up for notifications. When the baby comes, you log in and you send out the birth announcement to everyone who signed up. Creator Sandor Weisz had the best product inspiration of all: 

I'm a web designer and educator in Chicago, where I live with my wife and two kids. The idea came from my experiences in the days leading up to, and the hectic hours after, the birth of my kids. I wish I had had something like this back then.

 /via kottke.org

The Longest Shortest Time: Season 2

The Longest Shortest Time is a terrific podcast, created, produced, and hosted by Hillary Frank. I'll let her explain the project's beginnings:

I started the Longest Shortest Time podcast nearly three years ago, after a difficult childbirth and its aftermath, as an attempt to feel a little less alone. I've been a radio journalist for about 15 years for shows like This American Life, Studio 360, and Marketplace, so I thought, I'll use my microphone to get people to open up—to tell me the truth about early motherhood. Little did I know, my honest conversations with moms (and dads, too!) would make thousands of listeners also feel more connected—so much so that they began begging me to produce the podcast more often than once every few months.

I would say that listening to Season 1 was just as important and necessary as any of the pre-labor reading that I did.  The first few months after having a baby, fighting the feeling that you're the only one going through whatever nightmare scenario your infant has cooked up for you is really, really tough. Being able to hear other adult voices laugh and cry about the same issues is such a relief. While the Kickstarter has already reached its goal, download Season 1, and you'll see why you should still throw a couple of bucks Frank's way.

Full disclosure: I am a backer of the project. 

5 Non-Patronizing Parenting Tips

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Una LaMarche, writing on her blog The Sassy Curmudgeon: 

You'll notice I don't dole out much parenting advice on the blog. That's because I have an almost eighteen month-old and spend most of my days feeling like a complete and utter fraud and failure.
 
I know that sounds depressing, but here is the truth that will set you free: that's what parenting is.

I plan on printing out the above chart and saving it for when my daughter is about 14 or 15, which is when I'm assuming she'll start to realize that her parents maybe weren't/aren't always right. And that, as we raised her, it wasn't that we made the right decision or the wrong decision. It was just that, at 4:20am, when she had been screaming for 80 minutes, and her mom and I were determined to get her back onto The Sleeping Schedule, and we were naked and standing in the dark over her crib, only mostly sure that it was her mouth we were trying to push the pacifier into, both with alarm clocks set for 5am, there was no right decision. There were, and are, only tradeoffs.

/via The Huffington Post , by way of My Wife

Just a Reflektor

"Reflektor," the first single from Arcade Fire's upcoming album of the same name, has not one but two videos—the interactive Chrome experiment and the above regular, ol' black and white video, which features shards-of-mirror people, Haitian papier mâché caricature heads, and tossed-out dolls.

(Get it? Two videos? Reflection?) 

Reflektor will be released on 10/29.