a writer’s habits with regard to metaphor (and figurative language generally) were key to their entire worldview. Heavy users of figurative language, she said, see the world as interconnected, full of unseen ties and parallels. Whereas those who abstain from figurative language think that the world is made up of discrete things: every situation is... See more

Hate is the back of the mirror, without which you would just have a piece of glass. “It can be positive,” Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys wrote in a terrific 1992 polemic on the virtues of hate. “It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about… To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really

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Neuroscientists are building a powerful case that metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined. Many argue it’s the fundamental way that brains understand abstract concepts, such as love, joy, society and economy. It’s simply not possible to comprehend these ideas in any useful sense, then, without attaching them to

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