WYMHM: "science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts...it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence"

Getting to the root of people’s fascination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Gottschall said, is like “mapping wonderland.”

Literature, like other fields including history and political science, has looked to the technology of brain imaging and the principles of evolution to provide empirical evidence for unprovable theories.

WYMHM: "if a significant segment of their academic authors/readers insist on printed books while shunning the digital product, the transition is bound to be troubled."

Adding to the quandary in which university presses find themselves while navigating the storms of the digital transition (elevated to a near-perfect storm by the simultaneous recession) is that few of them have pools of available capital to fund required new investments in digital publishing platforms and cyberinfrastructure or to replace falling print revenues even temporarily while awaiting the predicted, but uncertain revenues deriving from sales of digital versions of texts. Faced with the collapse of their traditional business model, the decline of university subventions, and the increasing unwillingness and inability of universities to tolerate press debt, the problem for many university presses is not just how to manage the digital transition, but how to survive it.

WYMHM: "patriotic rituals exist to instill a sense of membership in a club, not to enumerate its bylaws."

Really, the whole pledge is just one big hapax legomenon, a string of syllables that only comes to life in classrooms and school assemblies. But there's a lesson for children in that: The attachment to flag and country is a unique bond that requires a special language of its own. In theory, the pledge could do most of the same work if we had children say it in Anglo-Saxon or Arapaho, or if we replaced it with the lyrics to "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah." They're going to turn the words into jabberwocky anyway: "I led a pigeon to the flag," "one Asian under guard."

via npr.org

WYMHM: "Laughing and crying...provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain."

A way of coming to a more integrated understanding of emotion is to surrender to the boundless accessibility of laughing and crying. I spent the last year occupied with such a task. The search for answers led me to areas as new to science as the mirror-neuron system, as painful as neurological disorders, and as artistic as method acting. There emerged a uniquely human science of emotion that begins to sew closed the doggedly dualistic notions of mind and body, heart and head. 

WYMHM: "[YouTube] facilitates the discovery of old artists by new generations"

For years, these narratives were passed down from older sibling to younger sibling and kept alive through iconic events embedded in the monoculture as well as smaller moments trafficked through the bootleg circuit run by ardent fans of the music. But, with the dawn of YouTube, these narratives started being perpetuated by the instant, free accessibility of archival footage. This is content that, until YouTube came along, had no real place in media besides the occasional kitschy or overly reverent clip show. In the past, if you wanted to experience that iconic moment in which Dylan muttered "play it fuckin' loud" in response to the man who cried "Judas," you had to track down a bootleg. Now, all you have to do is fire up your browser:

WYMHM: "It doesn’t matter whether we think students should or shouldn’t use Web sources such as Wikipedia; they will."

Sing the virtues of those processed pulp products called books. Hit students with your best shot about why they cannot find everything they need by sitting in their pajamas and surfing the Web. Require that research projects cite a certain number of items from the library. And after you’ve done all of that, take a cold shower and face the reality that most of them are still going to rely primarily on electronic sources. Don’t tell students not to use them; you’re only setting them up to deceive. (They’ll simply consult these but not cite them.)