February 03, 2018

From The New York Times (Amy Chua on "Tell us about the last great book you read."):

Tara Westover’s “Educated,” a memoir about a girl born into a survivalist family in the Idaho mountains who was not allowed to go to school and spent her days foraging for metal in a junkyard while trying to avoid the catalytic converters hurled at her by her fanatic, anti-government father. She somehow breaks free of the violence and emotional prison of her family and, against all odds, ends up getting a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. The book, which will be published on Feb. 20, is heart-wrenching. But it’s also a beautiful testament to the power of education to open eyes and change lives.

From The New York Times (Amy Chua on "Which novelists do you especially enjoy reading?"):

I love classics. Some of my favorites are Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” Flaubert’s “Salammbô,” James’s “The Golden Bowl” and Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury.” “Dream of the Red Chamber,” by Cao Xueqin, is also amazing. It took me a while (and at least five false starts) to get into it, but I ended up loving Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Julio Cortázar’s “Hopscotch” made a big impact on me — how ingenious to write a book whose chapters you could read in two different orders.

From Harper's:

Students who wear a police uniform display biased attention toward images of people wearing hoodies.

From The Economist:

It is difficult to prove that digital technologies are actually making people into worse writers. It is likely that the world is just seeing more unfiltered thoughts written down than at any other time in history. People are not writing worse so much as writing and publishing far more.

From The Economist:

[The] internet is changing language. Words, phrases and new ways of playing with grammar are coming and going faster than ever before.