Whether Paju Book City will live up to its motto at christening, "A City to Recover Lost Humanity," remains to be seen, but it's great to see so much thought and stunning architecture going into supporting and celebrating the life of books—of making them and of reading them.

architecture, asia, books, cultural worlds, korea, publishing

Nate:

The idea of a city of books evokes a fantastical vision: towers of tottering volumes, narrow alleys formed by canyons and stacks of dusty hardbacks, formal avenues between loaded shelves. Like something imagined by Calvino or Borges, it conjures up a city of wisdom and surprise, of endless narratives, meaning, knowledge and languages. What it does not evoke is an industrial estate bounded by a motorway and the heavily guarded edge of a demilitarised zone. Yet somehow, South Korea’s Paju Book City begins to reconcile these two extremes into one of the most unexpected and remarkable architectural endeavours.

Built on marshland, former flood plains and paddyfields 30km north-west of Seoul, Paju Book City is an attempt to create an ambitious new town based exclusively around publishing….

At the centre of the city stands a huge cultural complex, designed by Kim Byung-yoon, a combination of hotel (in which, it was pointed out to me, there are no TVs), restaurants, auditoriums and, on the roof, an urbane, elevated realm of seating, shops, libraries and galleries overlooking the sparkling waters of the river and the Simhak Mountain.

Guilt's benefits, in ascending order: it keeps us from being sociopaths; reminds us that we shouldn't do bad things and that when we do we should make (or seek) amends; and it may serve as a proxy for self-control, making possible the growth and development befitting a genuine fruit of the spirit.

atonement, children, guilt, horizons of the possible, psychology

Nate:

Guilt in its many varieties — Puritan, Catholic, Jewish, etc. — has often gotten a bad rap, but psychologists keep finding evidence of its usefulness. Too little guilt clearly has a downside — most obviously in sociopaths who feel no remorse, but also in kindergartners who smack other children and snatch their toys. Children typically start to feel guilt in their second year of life, says Grazyna Kochanska, who has been tracking children’s development for two decades in her laboratory at the University of Iowa….

“Children respond with acute and intense tension and negative emotions when they are tempted to misbehave, or even anticipate violating norms and rules,” Dr. Kochanska said. “They remember, often subconsciously, how awful they have felt in the past.”

In Dr. Kochanska’s latest studies, published in the August issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, she and colleagues found that 2-year-olds who showed more chagrin during the broken-toy experiment went on to have fewer behavioral problems over the next five years. That was true even for the ones who scored low on tests measuring their ability to focus on tasks and suppress strong desires to act impulsively.

Lovely meditation by Rebecca Larson on the possibilities within Twitter's 140-character limit.

communication, language, poetry, twitter

Andy:

This idea [of concise communication] certainly isn’t new. How about the book of Proverbs? “When words are many, sin is not absent, / but he who holds his tongue is wise” (10:19). At seventy-eight characters, including spaces and punctuation, eminently tweetable. What about memorable speeches? We don’t remember the whole speech. But the short quotes are bite-sized, so they stick. “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country” (seventy-nine characters). Long? No. Meaningful? Yes. Or how about song lyrics? “I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls, only to be with you. But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”—128 characters. Tweet it, baby.

This highly lauded poem by William Carlos Williams could be tweeted with 51 characters to spare:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Or this Japanese Haiku:

old pond . . .
a frog leaps in
water’s sound

Simple. Beautiful. Tweet-worthy.

A Spanish novelist's prescription for his fear of flying: learn to love airplanes as individuals. The humanizing touch is hardly absent from the history of flight: think of Howard Hawks' classic film Only Angels Have Wings or all those pin-up models painted onto the noses of WWII bombers. And it lives on in the work of a few contemporary writers—William Langewiesche in particular—even in the serial-number world of today's commercial aviation.

fear, flight, love, technology and change

Nate:

We live in an age that tends to depersonalize even people and is, in principle, averse to anthropomorphism. Indeed, such a tendency is often criticized, erroneously and foolishly in my view, since that ‘rapprochement’ between the human and the non-human is quite natural and spontaneous, and far from being an attempt to deprive animals, plants and objects of their respective selves, it places them in the category of the ‘humanizable’, which is, for us, the highest and most respectable of categories.

I know people who talk to, question, spoil, threaten or even quarrel with their computers, saying things like: ‘Right now, you behave yourself,’ or thanking them for their help. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s perfectly understandable. In fact, given how often we travel in planes, the odd thing about our relationship with them – those complex machines endowed with movement to which we surrender ourselves and that transport us through the air – is that it isn’t more ‘personal’, or more ‘animal’, or more ‘sailor-like’, if you prefer. Perhaps those who crew them haven’t known how to communicate this to us. I’ve never seen them pat a plane, as you might pat a horse to calm or reward it; I’ve never seen planes being groomed and cleaned and tidied, except very hurriedly and impatiently; I’ve never seen them loved as Conrad’s captain loved his sunken brig; I’ve never seen air hostesses – who spend a lot of time on-board – treat them with the respect and care, at once fatherly and comradely, enjoyed by ships.