How do you teach children to read? This question is at the heart of a decades-long battle. When we read our eyes skim the print, we notice the length of the word and maybe the first letter, then our ...

You’re reading Open Questions, Joshua Rothman’s weekly column exploring what it means to be human. What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an ...

Social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm writes that the hope of “1984” is to recognize the dangers of ...

W hen I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, it was a rite of passage for all English majors to discover that they had entirely misunderstood Robert Frost’s most famous poem “The Road Not Taken” ( ...