But tagging, alone, is still not good enough. Even our many tags become useless if/when their meaning changes (in our minds) by the time we go retrieve the data they point to. This could be years after we tagged something. Somehow, whether manually or automatically, we need agents and tools to help us keep our tags updated and relevant.

They face huge challenges,

what do we lose when we don’t read laterally, when we passively scroll information feeds and accept what seems to be true and dismiss what seems to be wrong.

John Green in CrashCourse

these words bring up all kinds of questions

Annotations—even inline marginalia which include your own writing—have very little informational value. They’re atomized; they don’t relate to each other; they don’t add up to anything; they’re ultra-compressed; they’re largely unedited. That’s fine: think of them as just a reminder. They say “hey, look at this passage,” with a few words of context to jog your memory about what the passage was about.Since you’re going to write lasting notes anyway, annotations need carry just enough information to recreate your mental context in that moment of reading. You wouldn’t want to rely on that long-term, since then you’d just have a huge pile of hooks you’d have to “follow” anytime you wanted to think about your experience with that book.

你說，這樣不是會忽略掉書中其他有價值的內容嗎？也許是，但是誰在乎？我是為了成長而學習，不是為了看完一本書而閱讀。在大學的時候，也沒有任何一堂課會上完了整本書，不是嗎？

讀書e誌這個粉專的特色是，版主會分享許多的英文原文書，有許多是台灣根本還沒翻譯版的，這種新鮮感總是令我愛不釋手。書評的行文風格很親切易讀，篇幅不會太長，文章也同步會發表在 讀書e誌部落格 上。你可以選擇自己喜歡的平台來追蹤。

There are good preprints and bad preprints, just like there are with journal articles. Overall, do not be afraid to be scooped or plagiarized! Preprints also actually protect against scooping [21,22]. Preprints establish the priority of discovery as a formally published item. Therefore, a preprint acts as proof of provenance for research ideas, data, code, models, and results—all outputs and discoveries.

Trying too hard to understand the minutiae initially can make it easy to miss a fairly apparently general theme. It’s productive to learn the parts that are accessible before putting in effort to fully understand everything. Don’t miss the forest for the trees.

an evaluation of social reading platforms; an analysis of social reading applications;

the sociality of reading: how we read in a group and how we share what we read.

their real hidden value: the readers.”

Table 4:

Table 3

Table 2:

Table 1: Design Principles for Learning Tasks

Instructional methods for part-task prac-tice aim at the strengthening of cognitive rules by extensive repetitive practice. Strengthening is a basic learning process that ultimately leads to fully automated cognitive schemas (Anderson, 1993

Procedural information (in Figure 1, the yellow beam with arrows pointing upwards to the learning tasks) helps students with performing the routine aspects of learning tasks, that is, aspects that are always per-formed in the same fashion.

sup-portive information in Figure 1 is not con-nected to individual learning tasks but to levels of complexity; it can be presented be-fore learners start to work on the learning tasks (under the motto ‘first the theory and only then start to practice’) and/or it can be consulted by learners who are already working on the learning tasks (under the motto ‘only consult the theory when needed’)

This feedback stimulates learners to critically compare their own mental models and cognitive strategies with those of others, including experts, teachers and peer learners

* Information-Processing Analysis : about the mental operations used by a person who has learned a complex skills

Dick and Carey Model

The Kemp Model of Instructional Design

(a) learning tasks, (b) supportive information, (c) procedural information, and (d) part-task practice

Learning tasks provide the backbone of the educational program; they provide learning from varied experiences and explicitly aim at the transfer of learning.

four-component instructional design (4C/ID)

Feedback is a constant loop and not something that should come right at the end of the e-learning course or training module. So, it is important for courses to have feedback inserted at the right places during instruction.

Feedback needs to be specific in nature, as well as confirmatory and corrective. This way the learners know what they did right and wrong.

Giving learners an indication of the desired outcomes help them calibrate their approach appropriately. This can be done via examples, case studies, and modelling various learning strategies like concept mapping, visualizing, role playing.

because it establishes some important relationships and concepts

Michael Hanley, discusses this very subject in his article

Dale H. Schunk, in his book Learning Theories

Successive Approximation Model (SAM)

Understanding Instructional Design

Suppose the algorithm chooses a tree that splits on education but not on age. Conditional on this tree, the estimated coefficients are consistent. But that does not imply that treatment effects do not also vary by age, as education may well covary with age; on other draws of the data, in fact, the same procedure could have chosen a tree that split on age instead

hese heterogenous treatment effects can be used to assign treatments; Misra and Dubé (2016) illustrate this on the problem of price targeting, applying Bayesian regularized methods to a large-scale experiment where prices were randomly assigned

Chernozhukov, Chetverikov, Demirer, Duflo, Hansen, and Newey (2016) take care of high-dimensional controls in treatment effect estimation by solving two simultaneous prediction problems, one in the outcome and one in the treatment equation.

These same techniques applied here result in split-sample instrumental variables (Angrist and Krueger 1995) and “jackknife” instrumental variables

Understood this way, the finite-sample biases in instrumental variables are a consequence of overfitting.

Even when we are interested in a parameter β ˆ, the tool we use to recover that parameter may contain (often implicitly) a prediction component. Take the case of linear instrumental variables understood as a two-stage procedure: first regress x = γ′z + δ on the instrument z, then regress y = β′x + ε on the fitted values x ˆ. The first stage is typically handled as an estimation step. But this is effectively a prediction task: only the predictions x ˆ enter the second stage; the coefficients in the first stage are merely a means to these fitted values.

Prediction in the Service of Estimation

New Data

Zhao and Yu (2006) who establish asymptotic model-selection consistency for the LASSO. Besides assuming that the true model is “sparse”—only a few variables are relevant—they also require the “irrepresentable condition” between observables: loosely put, none of the irrelevant covariates can be even moderately related to the set of relevant ones.

First, it encourages the choice of less complex, but wrong models. Even if the best model uses interactions of number of bathrooms with number of rooms, regularization may lead to a choice of a simpler (but worse) model that uses only number of fireplaces. Second, it can bring with it a cousin of omitted variable bias, where we are typically concerned with correlations between observed variables and unobserved ones. Here, when regular-ization excludes some variables, even a correlation between observed variables and other observed (but excluded) ones can create bias in the estimated coefficients.

97the variables are correlated with each other (say the number of rooms of a house and its square-footage), then such variables are substitutes in predicting house prices. Similar predictions can be produced using very different variables. Which variables are actually chosen depends on the specific finite sample.

Through its regularizer, LASSO produces a sparse prediction function, so that many coefficients are zero and are “not used”—in this example, we find that more than half the variables are unused in each run

One obvious problem that arises in making such inferences is the lack of stan-dard errors on the coefficients. Even when machine-learning predictors produce familiar output like linear functions, forming these standard errors can be more complicated than seems at first glance as they would have to account for the model selection itself. In fact, Leeb and Pötscher (2006, 2008) develop conditions under which it is impossible to obtain (uniformly) consistent estimates of the distribution of model parameters after data-driven selection.

First, econometrics can guide design choices, such as the number of folds or the function class.

These choices about how to represent the features will interact with the regularizer and function class: A linear model can reproduce the log base area per room from log base area and log room number easily, while a regression tree would require many splits to do so.

Ta b l e 2Some Machine Learning Algorithms

Picking the prediction func-tion then involves two steps: The first step is, conditional on a level of complexity, to pick the best in-sample loss-minimizing function.8 The second step is to estimate the optimal level of complexity using empirical tuning (as we saw in cross-validating the depth of the tree).

egularization combines with the observability of predic-tion quality to allow us to fit flexible functional forms and still find generalizable structure.

This procedure works because prediction quality is observable: both predic-tions y ˆ and outcomes y are observed. Contrast this with parameter estimation, where typically we must rely on assumptions about the data-generating process to ensure consistency.

In empirical tuning, we create an out-of-sample experiment inside the original sample.

Performance of Different Algorithms in Predicting House Values

We consider 10,000 randomly selected owner-occupied units from the 2011 metropolitan sample of the American Housing Survey. In addition to the values of each unit, we also include 150 variables that contain information about the unit and its location, such as the number of rooms, the base area, and the census region within the United States. To compare different prediction tech-niques, we evaluate how well each approach predicts (log) unit value on a separate hold-out set of 41,808 units from the same sample. All details on the sample and our empirical exercise can be found in an online appendix available with this paper athttp://e-jep.org

Making sense of complex data such as images and text often involves a prediction pre-processing step.

The fundamental insight behind these breakthroughs is as much statis-tical as computational. Machine intelligence became possible once researchers stopped approaching intelligence tasks procedurally and began tackling them empirically.

In another category of applications, the key object of interest is actually a parameter β, but the inference procedures (often implicitly) contain a prediction task. For example, the first stage of a linear instrumental variables regres-sion is effectively prediction. The same is true when estimating heterogeneous treatment effects, testing for effects on multiple outcomes in experiments, and flexibly controlling for observed confounders.

Machine Learning: An Applied Econometric Approach

Cabinet: one author or several; posts curated into particular collections or series’, often with thematic groupings, perhaps a “start here” page for new readers, or other pointers to specific reading sequences

For those not familiar with GPT-2, it is, according to its creators OpenAI (a socially conscious artificial intelligence lab overseen by a nonprofit entity), “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text.” Think of it as a computer that has consumed so much text that it’s very good at figuring out which words are likely to follow other words, and when strung together, these words create fairly coherent sentences and paragraphs that are plausible continuations of any initial (or “seed”) text.

Sustained reading of long form texts and books is perhaps the most “active” of all basic media consumption. Philip Roth, in 2009, prognosticating the death of the novel, smartly points out: To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities. I love this: “If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really.” Meaning: To truly read (and, I might add, write) is to commit and maintain focus long enough to live fully within the world of the book (as opposed to ten second dips in and out, as we mostly do with much online media).

when reading we can double back and re-read a word several times until it sticks (which according to some arguments may actually impair comprehension rather than increase it),

Goodreads is nearly useless for finding recommendations

Both artists, through annotation, have produced new forms of public dialogue in response to other people (like Harvey Weinstein), texts (The New York Times), and ideas (sexual assault and racial bias) that are of broad social and political consequence.

In Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf talks about how technology has led to more skimming rather than reading slowly and carefully. She talks about the benefits of “cognitive patience.” And she reminds us that reading quickly isn’t what makes someone a good reader.

Must-reads

Crafting Digital History

Two-fold arguments are also put forward concerning the just and the unjust

Since if anyone should ask those who say that the same thing is both disgraceful and seemly whether they have ever done anything seemly, they would admit that they have also done something disgraceful, if disgraceful and seemly are really the same thing.

but the right occasion

against the law

the most beautiful grave imaginable

I go on to the things which cities and peoples regard as disgraceful

(although for men to do so in the palaistra aid gymnasium is seemly.)

And I am not saying what the good is, but I am trying to explain that the bad and the good are not the same but that each is distinct from the other

I think it would not be clear what was good and what was bad if they were just the same and one did not differ from the other; in fact such a situation would be extraordinary

But there is another argument which says that the good is one thing and the bad another, and that as the name differs, so does the thing named.

And death is bad for those who die but good for the undertakers and gravediggers.

or at one time good and at another time bad for the same person

Suppose someone should question the man who says this as follows: Why don't you assign your household slaves their tasks by lot, so that if the teamster drew the office of cook, he would do the cooking and the cook would drive the team, and so with the rest ?

She felt out of place.

for starters orders

Of course, we've had our ups and downs

processed kind

Jean put the ruler down on the conveyor belt.

Think of all the oriental foods you can get into

her individual yoghurt seemed to say it all

a gross offish fingers

You can always tell a person by their shopping

when I turned up?

a see-through tray of tomatoes which fell casualty to the rest.

the quick till

Jean felt her patience beginning to itch.

giving an accompaniment of nods and headshaking at the appropriate parts.

why I should have to put up with her at family occasions.

Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneously presented information

Contiguity, however, is not the same as complicity,and qualitative differences can an

excessive reading has a scattering effect: “In reading of many books is distraction.”

Speed reading claims discredited by new report

The Shortest Answer is Doing the ThingIf reading at megaspeeds is not feasible, does that mean reading can’t be improved? Not at all.The serious way to improve reading—how well we comprehend a text and, yes, speed and efficiency—is this (apologies, Michael Pollan):Read. Reading skill depends on knowledge acquired from reading. Skilled readers know more about language, including many words and structures that occur in print but not in speech. They also have greater “background knowledge,” familiarity with the structure and content of what is being read. We acquire this information in the act of reading itself—not by training our eyes to rotate in opposite directions, playing brain exercise games, or breathing diaphragmatically. Just reading.As much as possible. Every time we read we update our knowledge of language. At a conscious level we read a text for its content: because it is a story or a textbook or a joke. At a subconscious level our brains automatically register information about the structure of language; the next chapter is all about this. Developing this elaborate linguistic network requires exposure to a large sample of texts.Mostly new stuff. Knowledge of language expands through exposure to structures we do not already know. That may mean encountering unfamiliar words or familiar words used in novel ways. It may mean reading P. D. James, E. L. James, and Henry James because their use of language is so varied. A large sample of texts in varied styles and genres will work, including some time spent just outside one’s textual comfort zone.Reading expands one’s knowledge of language and the world in ways that increase reading skill, making it easier and more enjoyable to read. Increases in reading skill make it easier to consume the texts that feed this learning machinery. It is not the eyes but what we know about language, print, and the world— knowledge that is easy to increase by reading—that determines reading skill. Where this expertise leads, the eyes will follow.

Start with the index, the table of contents, and the preface. This will give you a good sense of the book. Be OK with deciding that now is not the time to read the book. Read one book at a time. Put it down if you lose interest. Mark up the book while reading it. Questions. Thoughts. And, more important, connections to other ideas. At the end of each chapter, without looking back, write some notes on the main points/arguments/take-aways. Then look back through the chapter and write down anything you missed. Specifically note anything that was in the chapter that you can apply somewhere else. When you’re done with the book, take out a blank sheet of paper and explain the core ideas or arguments of the book to yourself. Where you have problems, go back and review your notes. This is the Feynman technique. Put the book down for a week. Pick the book back up, reread all of your notes/highlights/marginalia/etc. Time is a good filter — what’s still important? Note this on the inside of the cover with a reference to the page number. Put any notes that you want to keep in your commonplace book.

Step One. The first thing I do when I pick up a book is read the preface, the table of contents, and the inside jacket. Often, I’ll glance over the index too. This doesn’t take long and often saves me time, as a lot of books do not make it past this filter. Maybe it doesn’t contain the information I’m trying to gain. If it seems crappy, I’ll flip to a few random pages to verify. This filter is a form of systematic skimming. This isn’t my term, Mortimer Adler, a guy who literally wrote the book on reading, came up with it. Adler says there are four levels of reading. I tend to blend inspectional reading and analytical reading together for most books. This way, when I start reading a book, I have an idea what it’s about, the main argument, and some of the terminology involved. I know where the author is going to take me and the broad strokes of how they will bring me along. That’s very useful information. While reading, I take notes. I circle words I need to look up. I star points that I think are critical to the argument. I underline anything that strikes me as interesting. I comment like a madman in the margins. I try to tease out assumptions, etc. Essentially, I’m trying to engage in a conversation with the author. Maybe my questions will be answered on the next page or in the next chapter. Maybe I’ll need to find another book to answer them. Who knows. But I write them down. At the end of each chapter, I write a few bullet points that summarize what I’ve just read. When I’m done, I write a brief summary of the entire book and then I do something few other people do. I let the book age. I put the book on my desk and I won’t touch it for anywhere from a few days to a week. This is very important.

Step two. When I pick the book up again, I re-read every scribble, underline, and comment I’ve made (assuming I can still read my writing). Sometimes I can’t. I’m not the same person I was the first time I read the book, two things have changed: (1) I’ve read the entire book and (2) I’ve had a chance to sleep on what may have seemed earth-shattering at the time but now just seems meh. If something still strikes my interest, I write a note in the first few pages of the book, in my own words, on the topic. Often this is a summary but increasingly it’s ways to apply the knowledge. I index this to the page number in the book. Sometimes, and this depends on the book, I’ll create a sort of mental summary of the book’s main arguments and gaps. Sometimes I’ll cross-link points with other books.

Step 3 (optional but highly effective). Wait a few days. Then go through the book and copy out excerpts by hand and put them into your repository or commonplace book. I use these notes to connect and synthesize ideas as I read. To aid recall, connect the ideas to something you already have in your mind. Is it a continuation of the idea? Does it replace an idea? Is it the same idea in a different discipline? I add these connections to my notes and percolate them in my mind. Often I turn out to be mistaken but that’s the process. Most of the time, you get to see the ideas on Farnam Street. You can see how I connect and contextualize ideas, linking them across disciplines. I find writing about the ideas really helps me develop my understanding. Even if you don’t share your thoughts with millions of people you can do the same thing with Evernote, which is searchable, easy to use, and free. Personally, I do not use technology as a substitute for the non-technological approach mentioned above but rather as a compliment. I rarely listen to books but if you are listening to a book, create a new note for that book and type in notes as you are listening. I know a few people that do not take notes as they are listening because they listen in the car on the way to work. They find that sitting down right away when they get to work and typing up notes is an effective way to improve recall although the notes are less accurate.

It may seem as if kids are learning to read when they’re exposed to books, and some kids do pick up sound-letter correspondences quickly and easily. But the science shows clearly that to become a good reader, you must learn to decode words.

Girls, even when their abilities in science equaled or excelled that of boys, often were likely to be better overall in reading comprehension

Fourth, if you are still young, let’s say in the first third of your active reading life, you should indiscriminately devour as many books as possible – novels, short stories, poetry, nonfiction of all sorts without any regard for quality.

Anyway, after forty life is too short for reading poor books.

I have limited myself to 100 spaces for the next 10 years. That’s an average of 10 books per year

thrillers are excepted from the reading ticket

I consider it time wasted if a book leaves no traces in the brain, either because it is a poor book or because one has read it poorly

A book gets no more than ten minutes of my time before a verdict is reached – to read or not to read.

I read as much as before, to be sure, but fewer and better books, and each twice.

These ideas are rooted in beliefs about reading that were once commonly called “whole language” and that gained a lot of traction in the 1980s. Whole-language proponents dismissed the need for phonics. Reading is “the most natural activity in the world,” Frank Smith, one of the intellectual leaders of the whole-language movement, wrote. It “is only through reading that children learn to read. Trying to teach children to read by teaching them the sounds of letters is literally a meaningless activity.”

while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up.

It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.

The Migration of the aura through its facsimiles

Switching Codes

The role of touch in the multi-sensory experience of reading turns out to be as important as we intuit it to be when we hold a volume or turn a page — or better yet, when we mark it up.

Patricia Hampl is the author, most recently, of The Art of the Wasted Day.

teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities to meet the needs of children at different points in the process of learning to read.

Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound. What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers.

We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language. That's all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk.But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it. That's because human beings didn't invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.

students are not downloading texts in ePub format but, rather, as PDFs.

reading may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.

F or Z

The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text.

the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in college

empathy

Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate” reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or traditional mediums. 

use it or lose it

fourth and fifth grade

technology of recurrence

skimming

Results indicated that students who read on print were superior in their comprehension to screen-reading peers, particularly in their ability to sequence detail and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.

the reading circuit

“cognitive impatience,”

In this hinge moment between print and digital cultures, society needs to confront what is diminishing in the expert reading circuit, what our children and older students are not developing, and what we can do about it.

This is not a simple, binary issue of print vs digital reading and technological innovation.

My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight.

read stories

the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing - a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.

They have less patience for being bored.

I believe, and I try to emphasize to the students, that annotation is a deeply personal activity, my annotations may look different from yours because we think differently.

Welcome to the Newsela Instructional Content Platform. We solve the problem of reading engagement holistically for students, teachers, and principals. See our results See our results Fresh, adaptive reads for every subject. ELA Science Elementary Math SocialStudies Our Content Partners World-class students (yours)deserve world-class instructional content. History Bio National Geographic The Washington Post The Guardian ProCon.org Encyclopædia Britannica Scientific American Associated Press The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History PBS Newshour Smithsonian Perfect for elementary, too. With content and activities created specifically for students in grades 2-6, Newsela fits seamlessly into your elementary literacy routine. Learn more Assessments FTW. Every great love affair with reading begins with engagement, and Assessments are the ultimate in engagement. Know if students did the reading, if they’ve understood it, and much more. (All from the comfort of your mobile device.) Quizzes. Annotations. Writing Prompts. Teach vocabulary in context with Power Words. Forget word lists and memorization—the best way to learn new words is for students to encounter them in context while they read. Available on hundreds of articles. 5 Power Words with student-friendly definitions are embedded in hundreds of articles. Students can practice Power Words by completing 10 practice activities after reading. Words and points are collected on each student’s Word Wall. 123 Is your district missing something? Not anymore. We designed the Newsela Instructional Content Platform to fit perfectly into how your district already works. Integrate with Google Classroom, Canvas, Clever and more. Learn about PRO Learn about PRO It’s time to solvereading engagement. Join our community of 1,300,000 educators and counting. Join Learn about PRO Close Teachers Administrators Newsela About Newsela Pro Company Careers Content Partners Help Learning & Support Follow Us Press Blog Twitter Facebook Youtube Instagram © 2018 Newsela | info@newsela.com | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

3.NI.2.2Recognizeparticular websites as sources of research

Interestingly, the word Internet is never used in the CCSS reading stan-dards (Leu et al., 2011), despite the fact that the writing standards specify the use of “digital sources,” “technology,” and the “Internet” repeatedly (CCSS, 2010, p.41). Because of this, many will ignore instruction in online reading, thinking that the CCSS only references traditional, offline read-ing comprehension. Many may also fail to integrate reading and writing instruction, an important part of any literacy program.

like a picture in the newspaper

In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.

So even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others better, it is a way of treating ourselves better. Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

dismissing pleasure in reading (whether as illicit, or unserious, or whathaveyou) opens space for anxiety to become one’s dominant reading affect, and particularly “anxiety about whether we’re reading the right stuff, or reading for the right reasons, or reading in the right way.”

the only filter worth having is the one that distinguishes between what is relevant and what is not; what matters and what doesn’t.When you filter by right or wrong, not only are you trying to paint a whole with the smaller component of its parts, but you’re also limiting what you understand. Who is to say that there isn’t a lesson in what is wrong? Or more importantly, who is to say that what you assume to be right or wrong is just a current bias that, one day, you will come to readjust?Any time I reread a book that has been important to me in the past, I always come back with new lessons. Most books contain more than one idea, and they say different things in different places.

Every word, every sentence, and every paragraph of a good piece of writing has the potential to teach you something. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be selective about what you read or that you can’t give up on something that isn’t speaking to you. What it means is that for something to move you, you have to be ready to be moved.