PolyArchive

Your Brain, Explained: What Neuroscience Reveals About Your Brain and its Quirks Marc Dingman ‎Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2019 256 pages From the publisher: Sleep. Memory. Pleasure. Fear. Language. We experience these things every day, but how do our brains create them?   Your Brain, Explained is a personal tour around your gray matter. Neuroscientist Marc Dingman […]

Health Is Membership Wendell Berry Wendell Berry delivered a speech at the conference “Spirituality and Healing,” at Louisville, Kentucky, on October 17, 1994. Below is an excerpt: So far, I have been implying my beliefs at every turn. Now I had better state them openly. I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John […]

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times Katherine May Riverhead Books 256 Pages Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from […]

Music A Subversive History by Ted Gioia Perseus Books, Basic Books 528 pages, published 2019. From the publisher: “A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched” (Los Angeles Times) global history of music that reveals how songs have shifted societies and sparked revolutions. Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions […]

Felicity Carrol and the Murderous Menace is the second book in a cozy mystery series by Patricia Marcantonio. Released 11th Feb 2020 by Crooked Lane Books, it is 324 pages long and available in hardcover and ebook formats. Despite being the second book in the series, it works well as a standalone. This book features […]

Links of the Week, vol. 5 The following are links to interesting content we’ve read recently. If you would like to recommend a piece to share with our readers (no paywalled content, please), please use the contact form on our About page. ────────────── ● ────────────── Tom Vanderbilt | Slate: The Single Most Important Object in […]

Links of the Week, vol. 4 The following are links to interesting content we’ve read recently. If you would like to recommend a piece to share with our readers (no paywalled content, please), please use the contact form on our About page. ────────────── ● ────────────── Olga Khazan | The Atlantic: We Expect Too Much From […]

Links of the Week, vol. 3 The following are links to interesting content we’ve read recently. If you would like to recommend a piece to share with our readers (no paywalled content, please), please use the contact form on our About page. ────────────── ● ────────────── Catherine Caruso | Scientific American: Don’t Forget: You, Too, Can […]

Links of the Week, vol. 2 The following are links to interesting content we’ve read recently. If you would like to recommend a piece to share with our readers (no paywalled content, please), please use the contact form on our About page. ────────────── ● ────────────── When Joe Eichler Spoke Out About Race. He made good […]

Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant Ann Gardiner Perkins Sourcebooks, 2019 Description “If Yale was going to keep its standing as one of the top two or three colleges in the nation, the availability of women was an amenity it could no longer do […]

Links of the Week, vol. 1 The following are links to interesting content we’ve read recently. If you would like to recommend a piece to share with our readers (no paywalled content, please), please use the contact form on our About page. ────────────── ● ────────────── Six Verbs That Make You Sound Weak (No Matter Your […]

Review: Chasing the Bright Side by Jess Ekstrom This book covers a lot of the same ground that many positive-thinking self-help books do, but the author has some interesting stories to share. In particular, the relative she called “Uncle Bernie” became infamous when he stole away the wealth of many high-profile victims as well as […]

Review: Elgin Park: Visual Memories Of Midcentury America at 1/24th Scale This book reflects an interesting and unique project by artist Michael Paul Smith: he has created a fictional mid-century town. Using historically accurate car models (from the Franklin Mint and other sources), his own model buildings and roads, and his outdoor surroundings, he stages […]

Review: All Blood Runs Red by Tom Clavin, Phil Keith I had never even heard of Eugene Bullard before I read this book. His bravery and determination is truly inspiring, especially in the face of the many hardships he faced. It’s amazing to consider that one person’s life could take so many drastic turns, from […]

Search Terms Bring You Here I love advice columns in general, even when the columnist is terrible at his/her job. It’s fascinating, the problems that resonate so strongly inside a person that they ask a stranger for help. Anyway. Captain Awkward is one of the good ones, but one of my favorite series on the […]