Reviews and News:

Thirty of the world's most prestigious neuroscientists and developmental psychologists agree: The idea that there are different "learning styles" is a myth. It creates "a false impression of individuals' abilities, leading to expectations and excuses that are detrimental to learning in general, which is a cost in the long term."

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Larry Hart reconsidered: "Rodgers and Hart or Rodgers and Hammerstein? Most connoisseurs of American popular song define themselves, consciously or not, by their preference for one Broadway songwriting team over the other. Yet Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II each wrote the lyrics to dozens of songs that are still sung to this day, and the music that Richard Rodgers composed for them is identical in quality and similar in style. The two men's underlying sensibilities, to be sure, could not have been less alike: Unlike the fundamentally optimistic Hammerstein, Hart wrote clever lyrics that were by turns jaded about sex and tinged with despair. But he also gave us ballads as unabashedly romantic as anything that Hammerstein ever wrote.

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Matthew Walther reviews Ben Blatt's Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing: "Never, I think, has a purported piece of 'literary criticism' been so disconnected from literature and non-suggestive of all the things that might, and very frequently do, induce people to read. Does Blatt like books, or even words? After 271 pages, including 50-some pages of notes largely consisting of lists of novels written by Dickens, Pynchon, and Nicholas Sparks, it is an open question."

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The dim future of the EU.

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Machiavelli meets the Borgias in Sarah Dunant's new novel In the Name of the Family.

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A graphic version of T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding."

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Essay of the Day:

Anthony Madrid writes about the point of rhyming in Plume:

"Why does it seem to go against the spirit of rhyming to 'rhyme' a word with itself? It's not like that's never happened. Take the beginning of Havelok the Dane: 'Hearkeneth to me, good men. / Wives, maidens, and all men.'

"Why does that seem stupid to us? Just because it violates a convention? Or is it because it really does somehow defeat the purpose of rhyming?

"Look at these three rhymes: { new|renew}, { long|along}, { wise|otherwise}. Are those good? Or do they, too, seem to be at least somewhat missing some point?

"I'm going to propose: Everyone always knew that part of the 'point' of rhyming was to secure the effect of bringing disparates together. And not just bring them together, but bringing them together by virtue of an occult resemblance (sound) rather than a reasonable one (meaning). There's a tiny pleasurable surprise involved, and some kind of energy release. At any rate, it's not really an option to do otherwise—as every rhymer knows. At least nineteen times out of twenty, the meanings of the two words in a rhyme pair will have nothing to do with each other."

Read the rest. (h/t: John Wilson)

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Photo: Salt lake

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Poem: Håkan Sandell, "I Do Not Follow Dante Down." Translated by Bill Coyle

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