Our Madness: Talking with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Sarah Fawn Montgomery discusses her debut memoir, QUITE MAD.
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Posts Tagged: psychology
Breathing into the Paper Bag: Talking with Jenny Valentish
Jenny Valentish discusses her memoir, WOMEN OF SUBSTANCES.
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We’re All Unreliable Narrators: Talking with R.O. Kwon
R.O. Kwon discusses her debut novel, THE INCENDIARIES.
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A Haunted Reality: Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It
The narration isn’t dispassionate, but there’s a distance.
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Mixed Feelings: Your Divorce Won’t Ruin Your Kids
Marriage is one way of housing love. But there are a hundred other houses—sometimes you just have to build them yourself.
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The Color of Discipline
The violence inflicted by black parents onto their children was born out of both love and a deep, abiding fear for that child’s ability to survive the American caste system that devalues black life.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos discusses her new book Abandon Me, choosing to be celibate for six months, letting go of our own mythologies, and the sexist reaction women receive when they write nonfiction.
...moreWeekly Geekery
The hot young things of science fiction. Avoid IKEA with your lover today. Love, loss, and a spritz of psychology.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #69: Steven Schwartz
Steven Schwartz’s new book, Madagascar: New and Selected Stories, positively aches (often sighs, sometimes chuckles) with wisdom. Steven understands people. He understands why they do what they do, how they feel when they’ve done it, and he understands too how the twists of life can disrupt all of that so people act in peculiar, unexpected […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Clarence Major
Clarence Major discusses his new collection Chicago Heat and Other Stories, the artist’s role in politics, Donald Trump and race relations, and Paris in the good old days.
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The Read Along: Christina Nichol
Christina Nichol, author of Waiting for the Electricity, takes a deep dive into Korean literature and catches up on some classics of anthropology and psychology.
...moreReading Emotions
There’s nothing that the book world likes to debate more than the differences between literary fiction and commercial or genre fiction. According to a new study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, readers of literary fiction are better able to understand emotions as compared with readers of popular genre fiction, Electric Literature […]
...moreJust Fail Your Best
Tim Falconer writes for Hazlitt on the psychological importance of failure: When you do what you’re good at exclusively, avoiding what you are bad at, you live in an evaluative world, one that’s full of judgement…. The danger is this becomes an inauthentic world, one that you don’t engage in for its own sake and […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Boy meets lichen, proves 150 years of science textbooks wrong. Want to improve your social skills? Try fiction, not speed-dating. How wasps gave us Shakespeare. In psychology, American undergrad = caveman. Birds lose sex appeal when singing over city noise. (Unlike Benedict Cumberbatch.)
...moreLiving with False Memories
For Pacific Standard, Ed Cara explores the malleability of memory and the very real and frequent occurrence of false memories, via new work by criminal psychologist and memory scientist Dr. Julia Shaw.
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The Rumpus Interview with Bernadette Murphy
Bernadette Murphy on her forthcoming book, Harley and Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life, the challenges of selling a memoir, and life beyond “the suburban-wife-mother picture.”
...moreMind Over Genre
Over at Lit Hub, Jennifer R. Bernstein confronts the disciplinary rift that has grown between psychology and literature to show how the two are linked, even nested inside one another in our studies of self and pain: For these authors were writing literature of a kind; you could hear it in the music of their […]
...moreHello! Bonjour! Hola! Hallo!
Interpreting someone’s utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. What does a speaker know or not know? What did she intend to convey? Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others. Growing up in a multilingual environment has […]
...moreBlocking Writer’s Block
The New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova reveals the cause of writer’s block, the psychological state of those that have it and those that don’t, and how to combat it: …many symptoms of writer’s block are the kinds of problems psychiatrists think about. Unhappy writers, it seemed, were unhappy in their own ways, and would require therapies tailored […]
...moreWriting as a Cure
Word by word, and brick by brick, I began understanding the foundation of myself—of where I had been, and where I would go—from previously unseen angles. Over at Brevity’s nonfiction blog, Lauretta Zucchetti shares her experience of finding herself and overcoming emotional pain through the writing process.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Competing views of our technological progress. The exciting life and revolutionary science of Robert Trivers. Racism, psychology, and the British Empire. What’s in a name? A glacier.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Bad news from the free-Internet fight is also good news in the war on Google. A bit of sexist schadenfreude. Are psychologists who study morality evil? Want to make things really scary? Here’s how to do it. How do we work together?
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: A Finished Brain
In her twenties, the author was criticized for showing too much emotion. Decades later, having learned to compartmentalize, she’s accused of not being able to feel. Is this depression, or contentment?
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The Saturday Rumpus Review of The Martian
It is the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars for about a year, all by himself.
...moreAngry Birds, Calm Mind?
Can playing Angry Birds really make you feel more Zen? The answer, according to Jane McGonigal at Lion’s Roar, is yes: When we play games … we’re not just paying attention to the game—we’re paying a special quality of attention. That quality is called flow.
...moreNarrative Dependencies
People contain multitudes, and by multitudes, I mean libraries. For the Atlantic, Julie Beck presents us with a thrilling article on narrative psychology, providing some scientific basis for that brilliant statement by Joan Didion: we tell ourselves stories in order to live.
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) Now is a good time to read Green River Running Red. RIP Ann Rule. Fantastical history with Richard Nixon. This is not a drill. Reading Rainbow will be on Netflix. This is not a drill. The danger […]
...moreSit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter
Science of Us explains why it felt so great to write that angry letter to your boss (even if you never sent it): When we talk with someone with whom we don’t feel completely safe, our social editor jumps in on full alert and our guard is up. Writing is different. If you ask your editor […]
...moreWord of the Day: Woofits
(n.); an unwell feeling, particularly in the head; a moody depression; c. 1918, from Nevil Shute’s The Rose and the Rainbow The archetype of the mad genius dates back to at least classical times, when Aristotle noted, “Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.” […]
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