Arts and Letters Daily
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Points of View
“We are watching 18 screens showing high-definition images captured by nine cameras. Each camera was set at a different angle, and many were set at different exposures. In some cases, the images were filmed a few seconds apart, so the…
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“Decision Fatigue”
The exhaustion of decision-making is now scientifically validated. This essay looks at how decision fatigue, or “ego depletion,” manifests, in examining settings such as the courtroom, the grocery store, and even Ceasar’s decision to march on Rome. Decision fatigue can…
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Ideas of a Decade
A special issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “An Era in Ideas,” goes under the surface of words like “death” and “terrorism” that have entered the public imagination since the September 11th attacks. The collection of essays reflects on…
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E.B. White and his Animals
E.B. White’s anthropomorphisms became childhood story staples, but they were also were a method of expressing himself to his family, and furthermore, significant in the evolution of nature writing. This essay in the Chronicle Review considers E.B. White’s relationship with…
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Lying Artists
Artists and certain brain damage patients have overlapping tendencies—lying or “chronic confabulation,” in neuroscience vernacular. The difference is in that writers fabricate experiences and consciously control their associations whereas people who have incurred frontal lobe damage may be unable to…