Sophie McBain asks what will become of human memory at the age of smartphones, social media, and unlimited storage in the cloud.
memory
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Murder in Hawaii: The Two Trials of Maryann Acker
After three decades, author Linda Spaldin tries to help exonerate a woman on whose trial she had been a juror.
Posted inBooks, Quotes, Story
How Mary Karr Teaches Her Students About Memory: A Short Excerpt from ‘The Art of Memoir’
The celebrated memoirist uses a little deception and a judicious ‘fuck’ to make a point.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Proustian Powers of Ice Cream
Ice cream is Proustian. One bite can send you time-traveling decades back, to a hot summer day, when you walked barefoot on shell-dappled Gulf sands, vanilla ice cream dripping over the sides of a cone and onto your fingers. Maybe it was a reward for the first time you lost a tooth, a sweet, cold dish […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why We Dream About Our Childhood Homes
Sigmund Freud called dreams ”the royal road to the unconscious” and theorized that they reflected highly individual unconscious wishes. His student Carl Jung, who later broke with him, thought the recurring use of enduring symbols in dreams, like mazes, mirrors and snakes, reflected something more collective and universal. *** Many people interviewed said they dreamed […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘The Artist’s Memory Is a Dangerous, Necessary Thing’
Memory is your greatest ally and your primary source material, because memory is your body as it was in the world and the world as it was and will be; memory is the people you have loved or wanted to love in the world, and what are we if not bodies filled with reminiscences about […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Science of Suppressing Traumatic Memories
I had come to his house, in this sunny spot between Ben Gurion Airport and the Mediterranean coast, for an unlikely reason: not long ago, after decades of unwavering silence, Sigmund Schiller spoke about his Holocaust experience. “People talk about ‘Sophie’s Choice’ as if it were a rare event,” he said. “It wasn’t. Everybody had […]