How to Read

Welcome to In Sacred Spaces, a three-episode series in which we visit spaces around New Click here for more about the episode... In Sacred Spaces 3: The Pier (with The House of Louboutin)

Welcome to In Sacred Spaces, a three-episode series in which we visit spaces around New Click here for more about the episode... In Sacred Spaces 2: Grace Congregational Church of Harlem (with Nigel and Lisa Pearce)

Welcome to In Sacred Spaces, a three-episode series in which we visit spaces around New Click here for more about the episode... In Sacred Spaces 1: St James Presbyterian (With Derrick McQueen)

Reading today is typically silent - whether reading a book in a library or reading messages on our phones, we don’t expect the activity to be noisy. At most, we expect the sound of a page quietly turning. But Andrew Albin is interested in the medieval period, when books made all kinds of sounds. Medieval books were noisy: they crackled and creaked, and were usually read aloud (even in private). An...

When you think about historical reenactment, you probably think about reenacting Civil War battles or performing a character at a Renaissance fair. But Catherine Grant is interested in artists who use reenactment to ask questions about the history of feminist and queer activism, and the role of artists in political life. By reenacting and remixing scenes from history, these artists revive stories...

We may think of reading and writing as opposite activities, but there’s a long history of people reading with blank books by their side so they could write out their favorite passages as they went. Deidre Lynch is interested in what these homemade books can tell us about the people who filled them up. Like someone’s Pinterest board or Tumblr blog today, these curated collections of words told a st...

In the Bible, the Apocalypse is the end of the world as we know it, but it’s also the beginning of a new one. Jennifer Wilks argues that major catastrophes can be apocalyptic in the same way. A disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the COVID-19 pandemic can shed new light on the world’s social inequalities, which makes it easier to imagine them changing. Jennifer thinks that post-apocalyptic fiction...

Music can tell stories in a variety of ways: operas and musicals have characters and plots, a song can tell a short story, and even music without words can take listeners on a journey. But Randall Eng is interested in using unexpected texts like photocopier manuals and legal pamphlets to produce musical compositions that tell new stories. By cutting up and rearranging these existing texts – also k...

During the Cold War, the US and Chinese governments didn’t drop bombs on each other, but they did drop translated works of literature. In fact, national governments put a lot of effort into creating translations that covertly served their political agendas. In the case of the US, this meant emphasizing values like freedom and self-reliance, with which they hoped to win the hearts and minds of Chin...

A one-sided relationship is a bad relationship, right? Not necessarily, says Elaine Auyoung. She’s interested in what are called parasocial relationships, where we know and care a lot about someone but they don’t directly engage with us – like a celebrity, for example, or even a fictional character. While parasocial relationships are often thought of as inferior to regular person-to-person relatio...

What we notice about someone else’s language is less to do with language itself than with our perception of the person’s social status. This happens with kids in classrooms too, where teachers police the language of students with lower social status, while students with higher social status can say the exact same thing and nobody notices. This double standard can lead to Black students and bilingu...

Chronic pain is pain that lasts for months, years or even a lifetime, and doctors have a hard time understanding it. Not only is it sometimes impossible to cure, but doctors also tend to fixate on bodily pain and not address the ways pain is also psychological and emotional. In fact, Travis Chi Wing Lau argues that this attitude goes back to the ways doctors have been trained since the eighteenth...

You may have noticed that music has been sounding more chilled out recently, with softer voices, slower tempos, and fewer instruments. From famous artists like Taylor Swift to background music for working and studying to, chill vibes are all around us. But Robin James argues that chill isn’t just a style, it also has political implications. Chill music creates a mood that helps us be more effectiv...

The classic image of a reader is someone alone with their eyes on a book, ignoring the world around them. But Janice Radway argues that the communities we’re in can shape what we read and how we read. Reading is not something that only takes place in our individual minds, but an activity that influences and is influenced by our social world. From prison reading groups to caregivers who read to get...

When you picture a cheerleader, you probably imagine a woman. But in the early twentieth century, cheerleading was all done by men. Frank Guridy argues that the association of cheerleading with women is due to the growth of the sports industry, which has drawn ever more diverse people into sports previously dominated by elite white men. But increased diversity in the sports industry has also meant...

Do you want to live a predictable life? Can great art ever be predictable? Most people would probably say no to both, but Caroline Levine thinks predictability is more valuable than we usually recognize. Predictability is like putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others: we need to cover the essentials, like shelter and a stable work schedule, in order to achieve our grander ambitions. B...

Why do we click with some works of art and not others? Why does it bother us when we feel deeply connected to a song, painting, movie or book that our friends don’t connect with? Rita Felski uses the word attunement for this process of ‘clicking’, and she’s interested in how unpredictable it is. It’s tempting to try and predict in advance what art you will or won’t attune to, but it’s important to...

When you think of an expert or specialist, you might picture a scientist with a lab coat and test tubes. Science likes to claim that its knowledge applies everywhere - like gravity or evolution - which makes scientific knowledge superior to local knowledge about one specific place. But Paige West points out that in practice scientists rely heavily on local people’s knowledge, for example the speci...

What’s happened to reading during the COVID-19 pandemic? Some people are too busy or stressed to read, while others are reading more than ever but in different ways. Leah Price is interested in historical precedents for what we’re experiencing now, from anxieties about catching diseases from library books to the fantasy of reading as refuge from the world. History shows that reading is affected by...

Images of protest have a visceral power to grab our attention. Colin Leach has been studying how we react to different kinds of protest images. For example, an image of many police holding down one protester and an image of many protesters facing off against a few police convey very different messages about who has the power. Both protesters and police have an agenda for how they want to be repres...

Milan, Olivia and Colby talk about season 4, the challenges of recording remotely and why… Click here for more about the episode... Season 4 trailer

The world doesn’t revolve around you! Many children, and plenty of adults too, have heard this from parents, friends or partners. It’s easy and kinda satisfying to view others around you as minor characters in the drama of your life. But Paula Moya wants us to recognize that this arrogant self-centredness can lead people to believe that everyone else is just there to serve them. Paula argues that...

Many people today surround themselves with crystals, whether for healing properties or as part of their spirituality. But the question of whether crystals can affect the body or the spirit goes back millennia. Marisa Galvez has identified two distinct traditions for understanding crystals. First, there’s a Christian tradition that focuses on how crystals might allow us to transcend the body into a...

We usually don’t pay much attention to pauses in language - it’s easy to assume they’re just meaningless gaps between the meaningful words. But pauses are everywhere in spoken language - and, as Andrew Leong has been studying, in written language too. Pauses are not just an absence of meaning, but can drastically shift the meaning of the words around them. From an American short story, to a Japane...

Atmospheres are both insubstantial and yet very palpable - for example, think about tension that feels so thick you could cut it with a knife. Whether you’re decorating a room or throwing a party, creating the right atmosphere can mean the difference between success and failure. But Dora Zhang argues that no one person is ever in full control of an atmosphere, it’s always something collective, not...