Ever wonder where the word “OK” comes from?
How ‘OK’ Became America’s Favorite Word What began as a lame joke in a Boston newspaper morphed into one of the most ubiquitous expressions in the English language. Bleary-eyed readers scanning page two of the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, may have barely noticed the linguistic oddity buried in the blizzard of ink in the second column. At…
This Is How To Improve Your Writing: 6 Expert Insights
By Eric Barker from Barking Up The Wrong Tree Most of us walk around under the merciful illusion that our thoughts are orderly. They are not. Our brains are junk drawers filled with impressions, suspicions, slogans, half-remembered facts, emotional reflexes, borrowed opinions, and movie lines. We call this “having a point of view.” Writing calls it “a problem.” Writing is…
A Surprising Hobby Has Quietly Become A Dating Green Flag
A Surprising Hobby Has Quietly Become A Dating Green Flag It might be time to update your photos to include a book in the frame. By Fleurine Tideman for Huffington Post Once upon a time, people swiped on dating profiles because of big biceps, adorable dogs, or the massive fish a person may or may not have actually caught. Dating…
The antidote to shrinking attention spans is books.
The antidote to shrinking attention spans is books. A neuroscience research study from 2024 found that just 5 minutes of reading can significantly boost your ability to concentrate. Participants who read for 5 minutes in the study showed an improved ability to concentrate or cognitive focus on an everyday problem test that they were given compared to non-readers. The results indicate…
IQ, Poverty and Achievement: What we learned from the Terman study.
Lewis Terman (1877–1956) was a Stanford University psychologist famous for introducing the Stanford-Binet IQ test to the United States and conducting a massive, multi-decade study of gifted children (the Genetic Studies of Genius), starting in the early 1920s. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren and then identified the top 0.1%, kids with IQs of 140 and above. His…
There Is No “Science of Reading”
By Diane Ravitch from her blog Given the fact that about half the states have now mandated that teachers teach “the science of reading,” it seems to be a good time to repost what I wrote on November 1, 2023. Some things never change. I wrote: One of my grandsons sent me an article about the national rush to mandate…
