Mind Matters One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern LifeBy Mitch HorowitzCrown Publishing, 2014352 pp.; $24 cloth George Orwell once wrote that you had to be a part of imperialism in order to hate it. A comparable sentiment drives author and editor Mitch Horowitz’s inquiry in One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. This temperament sets One Simple Idea apart from recent takedowns of the movement such as Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, social critic Barbara Ehrenreich’s bald rejection of the cult-like mandate to treat her breast cancer with a positive attitude, and journalist Oliver Burkeman’s exploration of a “negative path” to happiness in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. And so it is that Horowitz, sans rose-colored glasses, attempts to record the lineage of the American positive thinking movement. More useful as part of these works would have been testimonials.
E316K -- Bremen I think that if there is any value in hearing writers talk, it will be in hearing what they can witness to and not what they can theorize about. My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea–she put her finger inside the cup. These are not times when writers in this country can very well speak for one another. In the twenties there were those at Vanderbilt University who felt enough kinship with each other's ideas to issue a pamphlet called, I'll Take My Stand, and in the thirties there were writers whose social consciousness set them all going in more or less the same direction; but today there are no good writers, bound even loosely together, who would be so bold as to say that they speak for a generation or for each other. The social sciences have cast a dreary blight on the public approach to fiction. Henry James said that Conrad in his fiction did things in the way that took the most doing.
Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic | | Notebook Maureen Tkacik [from The Baffler No. 19, 2012] Shepherd, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep. –Mary Baker Eddy Not long before The Atlantic’s parent company announced its swing into a profit-making business model despite operating in the most moribund corner of a publishing industry, I sat in a glass-paneled press room next to a small auditorium on the second floor of the Washington Newseum and took in the incipient profitability. The din of younger colleagues tapping keyboards is never soothing, but sitting in the press room of the Ideas Forum felt like a human rights violation. [New York Times financial correspondent] rankles [Treasury Secretary] with questions such as “What do you think is the most important thing the team has gotten right?” Omniscience is the operating principle by which everyone understands everyone else in Washington, D.C. Quinn wore a light beige pantsuit with a pink blouse that conjured the seventies.
O'Connor on "A Good Man is Hard to Find" Short Story Criticism Thomas Votteler Editor Total Number of Volumes in Set: 21 Gale Research, Inc.: Detroit 1990 Flannery O'Connor (essay date 1963) [O'Connor delivered the following remarks at a reading she gave at Hollins College, Virginia on14 October 1963. Much of my fiction takes its character from a reasonable use of the unreasonable, though the reasonableness of my use of it may not always be apparent. Flannery O'Connor, "On Her Own Work," in her Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969, pp. 107-18.
Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? | World news | The Observer Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means "love" in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did "all the usual things" like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. The sign outside her building says "Clinic". Inside, she takes me upstairs to her "relaxation room" – a bedroom with no furniture except a double futon. The number of single people has reached a record high. Many people who seek her out, says Aoyama, are deeply confused. Official alarmism doesn't help. Japan's under-40s won't go forth and multiply out of duty, as postwar generations did. Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. They don't seem concerned.
Good Old Wallace | If He Hollers Let Him Go - by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Discussed: Ohio’s Rolling Farmland, Hippies in Tie-Dye, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Kanye West, Oprah, A Simpler Way of Life, Seventy-Year-Old Comparative Literature Professors in Birkenstocks, Negritude,Thurgood Marshall, Black Activism, Patrice Lumumba, Stepin Fetchit, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Hemp Stores, Reuben Sandwiches, Dusk in Yellow Springs Although the city of Dayton is small and has been hit hard by the decline of industry, in Xenia and Yellow Springs the land is green, fecund, and alive, even in the relentless heat of summer. Xenia is three miles from where the first private black college, Wilberforce, opened, in 1856, to meet the educational needs of the growing population of freed blacks that crossed the Ohio River. Yellow Springs, a stop on the Underground Railroad, was initially established as a utopian community in 1825. In 1852, Horace Mann founded Antioch College and served as its president. Chappelle’s comedy found fans in many worlds.
Hey Mama by Kiese Laymon A black mother and her son talk about language and love in the South. Image by Jennifer Packer, Mario II, 2012. Courtesy the artist Hey Mama, I’m feeling alone this morning. Hey Kie, I’m tired. Mama, you always say that. You hug yourself by not allowing haters to distract you and by believing in yourself. Oh, lord. Don’t say “ain’t got” Kie. Or what? Or nothing. Nah, I’m serious. It depends on the judges. Mama, how have we been having the same conversation about language for thirty years? You are a grown man, but you’re still a black boy from Mississippi to people that want to hurt you. I have pictures of the look on my grandma’s face the first time she held my first two books. Hiding won’t protect us. I’m not talking about hiding. I don’t even really do Twitter, Mama. My friends tell me you write crazy-talk on that Facebook, and that Twitter. Mama. They’re trying to fix black boys on the cheap, without reckoning with white supremacy. What have you been thinking? I’ve been thinking too much.
Aphra Behn Aphra Behn (/ˈæfrə bɛn/;[1] baptised 14 December 1640 – 16 April 1689) was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration, one of the first English professional female literary writers.[2] Along with Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, she is sometimes referred to as part of "The fair triumvirate of wit." Little is known for certain about Behn's life except for her work as an author and as a spy for the British crown. There is almost no documentary evidence of the details of her first 27 years. She possibly spent time in Surinam, although much of her fiction has become entwined with her apocryphal biography. The bawdy topics of many of her plays led to her oeuvre being ignored or dismissed since her death. Life and work[edit] Versions of her early life[edit] Title page of the first edition of Oroonoko (1668) Information regarding her life is scant, especially regarding her early years. Career[edit] A sketch of Aphra Behn by George Scharf from a portrait believed to be lost (1873)