Want to help grow empathy and fight self-centeredness?

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There have been more than a few reports outlining a decline of empathy, but did you know (or maybe forget that) reading literature can help you experience another person’s life through reading? A recent study found that it is true (wow, I actually wrote that sentence here and probably deserve some shame.. anyways…).

While the story in Psychology Today is centered on business, it must still be true that the stories we tell our children have impact. Read with them, and read them stories that help them see the world for what it is and can be.

If you are in financial distress and can’t see the immediate value, know that in addition, literature can provide a gateway to other humanities, which is leverage that help navigate the world. Earl Shorris, who recently passed away, and whose book, “The Art of Freedom: Teaching the Humanities to the Poor” will be published in 2013, said the following:

Numerous forces—hunger, isolation, illness, landlords, police, abuse, neighbors, drugs, criminals, and racism, among many others—exert themselves on the poor at all times and enclose them, making up a “surround of force” from which, it seems, they cannot escape. I had come to understand that this was what kept the poor from being political and that the absence of politics in their lives was what kept them poor. I don’t mean “political” in the sense of voting in an election but in the way Thucydides used the word: to mean activity with other people at every level, from the family to the neighborhood to the broader community to the city-state.

Read the whole article: Harpers: Earl Shorris: As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor”

We focus so much on teaching concrete skills in school, as a means to an end, to get a job, but having that as the lone purpose of education is a mistake. I don’t know where I’d be without the books I’d find myself reading way back when. I had thought they were a means to escape whatever was going on my life thru my imagination, and sure, they were, but it turns out they helped me immeasurably in every day life and still do to this day.

Poverty on the rise… in the burbs

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Cities, for the first time in 100 years, are growing faster than the suburbs. Meanwhile, poverty has grown everywhere rapidly, even in places not thought possible:

While the overall suburban population grew slightly during the previous decade, the number of people living below the poverty line in the suburbs grew by 66 percent, compared with 47 percent in cities. The trend quickened when the Great Recession hit, as home foreclosures and unemployment surged. In 2010, 18.9 million suburban Americans were living below the poverty line, up from 11.3 million in 2000

Read the rest: NYTimes: Editorial: Struggling in the Suburbs

“Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.”

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I went on an interesting journey online last night that led me to the source of the above phrase, a poem on mortality, entropy, memory… and databases. Yes, you read that right.

I read Tor.com’s wonderful blog almost once a day to check up posts on books, favorite sci-fi and fantasy TV Series, and more. Yesterday they had a post featuring a striking photograph by Cat Valente of some haunting graffiti with the title of of this post scrawled out. She had recognized the line from an earlier post in Tor.com’s Poetry Month series, “John M. Ford’s sonnet ‘Against Entropy'”. Reading the comments in that post led to the original source of the poem, where it was written and shared for the first time.

In 2003 Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted about how moved he was by Andrew Brown’s writing about the slow and terrible death of a friend’s wife. He lamented, If I were a better writer I’d conclude by yoking the trivial to the tragic, relating the twin inevitabilities of death and database error by means of a rhetorical figure involving worms.. In the comments of that post, John M. Ford, the writer Neil Gaiman said of, my best critic … the best writer I knew, wrote the following:

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days —
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

A poem, written in a blog post comment in 2003, shows up on a physical wall in 2012.

The poem speaks loudly about the ends of things, our role, and even the work I do, which has everything to do with building systems that can adapt and grow in the face of bit rot and lack of attention.

Damn it, I don’t care if it isn’t hip, I still love the Web.

My Favorite Classic Doctor Who Episodes

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This is a handy list of older Doctor Who episodes to watch while waiting for the new season to start. For new fans, if you can get past the special effects, and imagine a series where most episodes were more like ‘The Empty Child’, slower, and a whole lot creepier, and maybe imagine yourself as a 7 year old, watching on a small black and white TV in the middle of the night alone, these will be fun. Enjoy!

  1. Fourth: The Brain of Morbius
  2. Fourth: The City of Death
  3. Fourth: The Genesis of the Daleks
  4. Third: The Three Doctors
  5. Fifth: The Caves of Androzani
  6. Fourth: The Deadly Assassin
  7. Fourth: The Robots of Death
  8. Third: The Spearhead from Space
  9. Fourth: Pyramids of Mars
  10. Third: Planet of Spiders
  11. Fourth: The Arc in Space
  12. Third: Inferno
  13. Fourth: Planet of Evil
  14. First: The Unearthly Child
  15. First: The Daleks
  16. Second: The War Games
  17. Second: The Evil of the Daleks
  18. Second: The Tomb of the Cybermen
  19. Fourth: Logopolis
  20. Fifth: Castrovalva
  21. Fifth: The Five Doctors