Bespacific recommended 928 articles this year. These were our favorites
The Ten Biggest Literary Stories Of 2020
It was pretty bad, overall. Some parts were okay. There were some good books. There were some bad actions. There were some much-needed reckonings. –LitHub
How Literary Theory Took Over The 1980s
“As deconstructionist reading started becoming more widespread, disseminated in the United States, a lot of people noticed the similarity—rightly so—between the reading style and New Criticism because of the close reading and the attentiveness to language. That was a major thing that happened that actually influenced the course of English study in the United States for a couple of decades—and, actually, still.” – LitHub
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel, and The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik deBoer, reviewed by Agnes Callard at Boston Review.
The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle by David Edmonds, reviewed by Clare Clark at Standpoint.
Why Play Is Essential To Ideas
Because thinking minds are different from evolving organisms and self-assembling molecules, we cannot expect them to use the same means—mechanisms like genetic drift and thermal vibrations—to overcome deep valleys in the landscapes they explore. But they must have some way to achieve the same purpose. As it turns out, they have more than just one—many more. But one of the most important is play. – Nautilus
Researchers developed an AI system that predicts the likelihood people will spread misinformation based on words they use Poynter: “University of Sheffield researchers Yida Mu and Dr. Nikos Aletra report they’ve developed an artificial intelligence system to help identify Twitter users who are more likely to share unreliable news sources. In their study published in the journal PeerJ Computer Science, the researchers found strong correlations between specific language patterns and the propensity to share false information. Users who shared dubious information tended to use the words, “media,” “government,” “truth,” “Israel,” “liberal,” “muslim” and “Islam” in their tweets. Users who shared more reliable information sources tended to use more personal words such as “myself,” “feel,” “excited,” “mood,” “mom” and “okay.” Topics related to politics such as political ideology, government and justice are correlated with users that propagate unreliable sources. “We also observe a high correlation of such users with the topic related to impolite personal characterizations. This corroborates results of a recent study that showed political incivility on Twitter is correlated to political polarization,” the study authors wrote. The researchers based their findings on the analysis of over 1 million tweets from approximately 6,200 Twitter users. This data helped the researchers develop a “new natural language processing methods.”…