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A mere two weeks after I wrote about The Long Decline of Reading, which drew largely on the US National Endowment of Arts’ (NEA) 2007 data, the NEA promptly released a report (Reading on the Rise) showing that fiction reading rates significantly increased from 2002 to 2008. Not just for certain age groups or ethnicities, [...]

There’s been some ruckus about a History class at George Mason University in which students created a hoax about an ‘Edward Owens’, the “Last American Pirate”. They made a blog, put up some YouTube videos, and most annoyingly, created an article on Wikipedia.
I find these hoaxes tiresome. We all know that it’s easy to publish [...]

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
- Steve Jobs on eBook readers and the [...]

The vision: Eager teens, listening quietly and attentively as I led a discussion about alternate reality games.
The reality: Thirty seconds into my prepared spiel, there were four hands waving in the air and the kids at the back were already talking. “Oh boy,” I thought, hoping to make a quantum leap out of here, but [...]

At my school, all students were entered into the English Literature GCSE. What this meant was that a couple of times a week, we would take out copies of ‘English Literature’ – things like The Crucible, A Passage To India, various Shakespeare plays, poems – and take turns reading them out.
There is nothing that kills [...]

Like many others, when I was kid, two of the games I had the most fun with were Lego and Meccano. It would be trite to go into the reasons why, and it’s enough to say that construction kits like these offer kids a unique place to use their imagination to build anything they want, [...]

If you’ve ever visited Oxford, chances are that you’ll spend some time in Radcliffe Square, admiring the University Library and the round Radcliffe Camera building. Along the east side of the the square is a long wall with a black metal gate set into it; people often poke their heads in to see an immaculate [...]

Interesting article from today’s New York Times, What a College Education Buys:
Moreover, if you’re not planning on becoming, say, a doctor, the benefits of diligent study can be overstated. In recent decades, the biggest rewards have gone to those whose intelligence is deployable in new directions on short notice, not to those who are locked [...]

Once again we are at that special time of year when the GCSE and A-Level results are announced for secondary school students here in the UK. There’s almost no point reading the newspapers since they always run the same stories. If the results for an exam improve, that’s because it’s getting easier. If they get [...]

“… You should aim for a total text length of 6000 words. Other than in exceptional circumstances, you should not exceed 8000 words.”
That’s a typical guide for a dissertation at Cambridge. When I read that, I think to myself, ‘Okay, in that case I should aim to write around 6000 words.’ Seems straightforward enough.
But apparently [...]