How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author

How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author: “Locating a novel, short story, or poem without knowing its title or author can be very difficult. This guide is intended to help readers identify a literary work when they know only its plot or subject, or other textual information such as a character’s name, a line of poetry, or a unique word or phrase.” Created by Peter Armenti, Digital Reference Specialist, Library of Congress. [h/t gov-info: The Government Info Librarian blog]

Police investigate following top legal eagles' swanky party at not so Loving, Grad, Castle 

Better than a scene from Rake, legal circles are buzzing with tales following a recent soiree.

The Spying Racket: how life insurers target mentally ill policyholders

Spying is a tool used by life    insurers to try and knock back claims.

Tourbird FAQ: “Touring Bird helps travelers explore, compare, and book tours, tickets, and activities from multiple providers in top destinations around the world—all in a single place. What can I do with Touring Bird? With Touring Bird, you can:

• Find everything in one place – When you select a destination city, you’ll see popular attractions, suggested tours and activities along with prices, options for free guided tours, and recommendations from locals and travel bloggers.

Humans Are Destroying Animals’ Ancestral Knowledge The Atlantic

Royal Botanic Garden seeks respect for world’s fungus ABC

From punishing to pleasurable, how cursive writing is looping back into (some) of our hearts
Washington Post – “Cursive in all its flowing permutations — the opal-shaped calligraphy of Spencerian, the simplified and precise Palmer Method; the spare D’Nealian, distinguished by its saucy “monkey tails”; the stolid and reliable Zaner-Bloser — was once a staple of American elementary education. In the classroom pantheon of Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, cursive was the writing. In recent decades, cursive was declared moribund, if not dead, after it was shredded from the Common Core in most states, including Connecticut. Typewriters, copiers, computers, phones, a veritable “Murder on the Orient Express” of culprits, had conspired to kill it.

Hidden gems: The magic of potatoes

Study shows how exercise generates new neurons, improves cognition in Alzheimer’s mouse Medicalxpress

The Loneliness Effect US News and World Report

… Is Literature Dead? 

… it’s not hard to make a case for Common Sense as the most important book ever published in America, but from the vantage point of the present, it raises questions that are less easily resolved. Could a book, any book, have this kind of impact in contemporary society? What about a movie or a website? Yes, the Daily Kos and FiveThirtyEight.com attracted devoted and obsessive traffic in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, but the percentages (and the effect) were nowhere near what Paine achieved. Even Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, released barely six months before the 2004 election to packed theaters and impassioned public debate, came and went in the figurative blink of an eye.

Why Is Music Pleasurable? (No Really…)

"Perhaps then, pleasure and music are connected in some way further removed from both the obvious sonorous tickle that music affords or the formal demands that music places on the listener. Perhaps we haven’t gone far enough when we suppose that pleasure in music derives from the recognition within it of a passionate utterance, or an imitation of nature, or an intense game of challenging listening to be played. Perhaps we’ve been asking too many questions about what in music is pleasurable, and too few about how pleasure is a phenomenon with musical qualities." … Read More