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Human beings think, speak, and write in metaphors. Those metaphors change as cultures do; people use them to respond to and reshape the world. Indeed, neuroscientists and literary scholars alike have explored how we build the world with metaphors and other figurative language. The present era is undergoing a massive metaphorical transformation, as computer technology […]
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Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi once wondered if he might be a dream that a butterfly was having. A couple of millennia later, a biologist asks a similar question in Greg Bear’s novel Vitals (2002). “Larger and older minds live inside our bodies and all around us,” Bear’s scientist declares. “Perhaps we are only a dream the […]
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Thirty years ago, I planned to write a book about Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. With a monograph in mind, I assembled Bowen’s essays and reviews scattered across various magazines and newspapers. What started as a few items retrieved from obscurity quickly snowballed into hundreds. I began visiting archives and fitting […]
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When is interruption an art form? Short answer: the eighteenth-century novel. Interrupting another speaker gets a bad rap: common charges lodged against listeners who jump the queue maintain that interrupters are pushy, rude, impatient, or, at the least, distracting. Certainly, the first generation of emerging novel theorists directed similar rhetoric against the cacophony of tale-tellers […]
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It’s another dull, grey Tuesday morning. A colleague asks you how you are. Reflecting on the seemingly endless flow of tedious meetings in the day ahead, you reply that you’re “losing the will the live”. Your co-worker chuckles and walks back to wherever they need to be. I think most people understand the context of […]
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In the classic film Casablanca, the Frenchwoman Yvonne, one of the regulars of Rick’s Café, joins the other refugees assembled there to sing the Marseillaise, boldly defying the Nazi officers present. She concludes her national anthem with a shouted “Vive la France!”, tears streaming down her face. We now know that the tears were not […]
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Nostalgia has become a defining emotion of twenty-first-century Western culture. From endless film franchise reboots, to the Eras Tour, to the 1980s world of Stranger Things, our media seems perpetually transfixed by the past. Nostalgia—the bittersweet yearning for an absent home—has a remarkable power to enchant us, for good or ill. It can, in the […]
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A lot of ethical programs are predicated on ideas of sameness and reciprocity. These programs urge us to imagine other people as similar to ourselves and to treat them accordingly. This is the essence of the biblical teaching to ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ and is the gist of the so-called Golden Rule: ‘Do unto […]
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