Literature

April Is National Poetry Month, and We’re All Invited to the Party 21
- Culture, Education, Featured, Literature, Uncategorized
- April 1, 2025
“April is the cruelest month,” begins T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land.” Literal-minded folks living in Minnesota in January or Alabama in August might get a few chuckles from that line. Cruelty and chuckles aside, April is also National Poetry Month (NPM). Initiated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, “National Poetry Month
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Boys Will Be Boys … or Will They?14
- Education, Featured, Literature, Uncategorized
- March 28, 2025
In January, my young friend Anna and I inventoried authors by gender on the “New Fiction” shelves of our public library. That count came to 123 novels and short story collections written by women, 64 authored by men. The disparity came as no thunderbolt to me, as I’d noticed for several years the number of
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Why ‘Popcorn Books’ Are Good for You 36
- Culture, Featured, Literature, Uncategorized
- March 21, 2025
If literature were a food pyramid, a ranking of vitamins and nutrients for the mind and soul, the classics would be the equivalent of steak, eggs, and fish, books high in intellectual protein like Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” Sigrid Undset’s “Kristin Lavransdatter,” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Next would come the fruit
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The Women Taking an Alternative Path in the Nationwide Library Fights 2
- Culture, Education, Featured, Literature
- February 17, 2025
Let’s begin, as so many good things begin, with the dream. For years, conservative political activist, wife, and mother Connie Marshner of Front Royal, Va., dreamed of opening a private library, one aimed particularly at children. “I had collected books forever, especially children’s books, because I believe so strongly in beauty and beautiful books,” Marshner
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Are AI Poems Better Than Human-Written Poems?5
- Culture, Featured, Literature
- December 16, 2024
A recent study published in Scientific Reports uncovered that the average reader couldn’t tell the difference between AI-generated poetry and human-written poetry. Most of these readers even preferred the AI works to the human ones. In the study, researchers asked Open AI’s ChatGPT-3.5 to write poems in the style of famous poets such as Walt
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The Complex Legacy of George Orwell 4
- Featured, History, Literature, Politics
- November 14, 2024
George Orwell, one of the most influential political writers of the 20th century, is widely recognized for his searing critiques of totalitarian regimes in his novels Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell’s portrayal of state control, propaganda, and the manipulation of truth has resonated with readers across the political spectrum. However, Orwell’s personal political ideology and his critiques of totalitarianism
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