New Year's Resolution Reading List: 9 Essential Books on Reading and Writing. By Maria Popova Dancing with the absurdity of life, or what symbolism has to do with the osmosis of trash and treasure. Hardly anything does one’s mental, spiritual, and creative health more good than resolving to read more and write better. Today’s reading list addresses these parallel aspirations. And since the number of books written about reading and writing likely far exceeds the reading capacity of a single human lifetime, this omnibus couldn’t be — shouldn’t be — an exhaustive list.
It is, instead, a collection of timeless texts bound to radically improve your relationship with the written word, from whichever side of the equation you approach it. If anyone can make grammar fun, it’s Maira Kalman — The Elements of Style Illustrated marries Kalman’s signature whimsy with Strunk and White’s indispensable style guide to create an instant classic. On a related unmissable note, let the Elements of Style Rap make your day. On the itch of writing, Lamott banters: On why we read and write: Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication. Author Affiliations Communicated by Charles G. Gross, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, June 18, 2010 (received for review April 30, 2010) ↵1G.J.S. and L.J.S. contributed equally to this work. Abstract Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains.
Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker's spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker's activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener's activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Freely available online through the PNAS open access option. Brian Greene on string theory. Personal and Historical Perspectives of Hans Bethe. TEDTalks as of 01.03.12.