Debbie Foster

There's no version of "control the poets" that's easily compatible with a free society.

A cento, from the Latin word for "patchwork," is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets. This means none of the writing is yours; the lines belong to others, and your work as the writer is selecting the necessary pieces, then assembling the fragments to make a new whole. In my experience, juxtaposing lines from different

there is no objectivity in taste, simply more or less intelligent expression of why you like or dislike something, an idea which may seem threatening or even dangerous if you're the sort of person who has based your identity on a sense of cultural superiority or on sensitivity to imaginary elitists who are sitting in judgment. The only truly "bad

Mere computation, the transformation of information, is not enough for the making of meaning.

Freud's technique for interpreting dreams was very straightforward. When a patient recounted a dream, Freud would isolate thoughts, feelings, conversations and images, and use each of these elements as a starting point for exploratory discussions and free association. Repressed material was then likely to 'fall in' to the flow of the patient's

we can seriously entertain the experience-source hypothesis—that is, the hypothesis that basic religious convictions around the world are cultural reworkings of a recurring set of direct experiences and not (only) reworkings of indirect historical context

Here are some thinking prompts you can use while reading:

• How could I put this in my own words?

• How do I know this is true?

• How can this be applied to my life?

• How do I feel about this?

• How would I improve this?

• How would I change this?

• How would I explain this to a 5-year-old?

• What is the main idea here?

• What is this similar to?

• What is

for children, the act of seeing a person – which is to say, of knowing about the person’s presence – depends on a mutuality of gaze: the child believes that only when an observer locks eyes with her can he register her actuality.

The ability, or lack of it, to live with uncertainty shows up in psychology as the individual characteristic intolerance of uncertainty (IU). The person with more IU responds to situations of uncertainty with more negative emotions and rumination. It is a trans-diagnostic trait, i.e., it seems to be an important factor across various emotional