Link Reads
Week of 5/26/19
Here are 5 stories from the web we think you’d like to know about.
This week: the state of the college library, the truth of the digital divide, and an alternative to mindfulness.
The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper, The Atlantic
University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.
“University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves. The University of Virginia, one of our great public universities and an institution that openly shares detailed library circulation stats from the prior 20 years, is a good case study. College students at UVA checked out 238,000 books during the school year a decade ago; last year, that number had shrunk to just 60,000.”
It's Not Only Rich Teens That Have Smartphones, The Atlantic
To focus only on the ‘digital divide’ between desktop and laptop users is to miss an encouraging trend.
“51 percent of teenagers in low-income families have their own smartphones, and 48 percent of tweens in those families have their own tablets. Note that these are their own devices, not devices they have to borrow from someone else. Among middle-income families (that is, between $35,000 and $100,000), 53 percent of tweens have their own tablets and 69 percent of teenagers have their own smartphones, certainly higher but by a lot less than one might imagine.”
If You’re Sick of ‘Mindfulness,’ Might I Recommend ‘Interoception’?, The Cut
“What if it’s not your friend/husband/child who’s making you unhappy, what if it’s just your body? (“Just.”) Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, encourages anyone feeling dread to first ask themselves, “Could this have a purely physical cause?”
Here are 24 cognitive biases that are warping your perception of reality, World Economic Forum
“In total, there are 180+ cognitive biases that mess with how we process data, think critically, and perceive reality.”
As native speakers, how many rules do we not know but still follow? The Language Nerds
“Even English grammar, the ins and outs of which have been studied by thousands of people for centuries on end, has not been completely described. You can’t go anywhere and pick up a book or look up a computer program that has all the rules of English. Thus, there is no documented list of the rules an English speaker is supposed to know and so most native speakers don’t really “know” most of the rules of English.”
