The news about reading in general, and childhood reading in particular, is not good. Last year a National Literacy Trust survey of more than 100,000 young people between the ages of 11... Read more »
In the book-length essay Death By Landscape, Elvia Wilk gives a potted history of fiction in which humans turn into plants. There is Daphne, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who is so afraid she will... Read more »
In 2022, Jacinda Ardern, the then Prime Minister of New Zealand, was approached by a stranger in an airport bathroom. Ardern was alone, washing her hands, when a middle-aged woman walked up... Read more »
Why would René Descartes, the father of modern rationalist philosophy, choose “meditations”—a term and genre associated with religious discourse and practice—for the title of his magnum opus that lays the metaphysical foundations... Read more »