Born on this day – William Brinkley:

William Brinkley

Writer

September 10, 1917 – November 22, 1993

When William Brinkley was a reporter for The Washington Post, he wrote the article covering the exorcism of a 14-year-old boy who lived in Mt. Rainier, Washington.

This case later became the inspiration for the novel The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, published in 1971, and the movie of the same title, directed by William Friedkin and released in 1973.

Article dated: Friday, August 20, 1949.

A book written by a second grader is a hot commodity at an Idaho library:

Second Grader's Handwritten Book Has Years-Long Waitlist After He Snuck It on Library Shelf:

An 8-year-old's hope to share his original book with others has led to a 55-person waitlist at an Idaho library.

By Charmaine Patterson

January 31, 2022

 

Photograph credit: ALEX HARTMAN / ADA COMMUNITY LIBRARY

 

A book written by a second grader is a hot commodity at an Idaho library.

 

Dillon Helbig, 8, used a trip to the Ada Community Library's Lake Hazel Branch in Boise with his grandmother as the perfect chance to share his original work, The Adventures of Dillon Helbig's Crismis by "Dillon His Self," with readers.

 

While at the library in December, Helbig managed to slip his 81-page book, made with a red notebook and designed with colored pencils, onto a shelf in the children's picture-book section without being spotted. His grandmother had no idea Dillon made the "naughty-ish" move, as he described it to The Washington Post.

 

His book tells the story of Helbig decorating a Christmas tree when the star blasts him to the first Thanksgiving and the North Pole. Infamous holiday antagonist the Grinch also makes an appearance at the end.

 

He told his mother, Susan Helbig, about leaving his book on the library shelf. But when they went to retrieve it two days later, it wasn't there. Susan contacted the library to see if his book had been discovered, and asked that it not be thrown away.

 

Alex Hartman, the branch manager, told the outlet that he and other library staffers found Dillon's book, and it "was far too obviously special an item for us to consider getting rid of it."

 

"It was a sneaky act," Hartman said, adding that the employees and even his 6-year-old son got a good laugh out of it.

 

"Dillon is a confident guy and a generous guy. He wanted to share the story," Hartman continued. "I don't think it's a self-promotion thing. He just genuinely wanted other people to be able to enjoy his story. … He's been a lifelong library user, so he knows how books are shared."

 

Dillon's book was officially added to the library's graphic-novels section, allowing library cardholders to check out the special item and enjoy it for themselves.

 

He told Good Morning America that it's a dream come true. "I wanted to put my book in the library center since I was 5, and I always had a love for books and libraries," Dillon said. "I've been going to libraries a lot since I was a baby."

 

He was also awarded the library's first-ever Whodini Award for Best Young Novelist, named after the library's owl mascot, per The Washington Post.

 

Now, locals have signed up to check out the book, which had a waitlist of 55 people as of Saturday. Readers can keep the book for up to four weeks, but due to the high demand, cannot renew it.

 

Dillon has revealed that a sequel is already in the works. His follow-up will describe him getting back at the Grinch, and his dog Rusty will also be featured.

 

The second grader is also working on another book, The Jacket Eating Closet. He explained on Good Morning America how it's inspired by true events.

 

"Every time in kindergarten, I put my jacket in the closet and during recess, it would be gone. The jackets are still gone and that's why I'm making the book," he said.

 

Dillon is also influencing his classmates, who say they also aspire to write stories. "It's pretty neat to see how he's inspiring little minds," Susan told The Washington Post.

Second Grader Sneaks His Handwritten Book onto Library Shelf | PEOPLE.com

What we lost when we stopped binge reading books:

By George F. Will
Columnist
The Washington Post
April 17, 2020

Long before today’s coronavirus lockdown provided occasions for the vice that the phrase denotes, “binge watching” had entered Americans’ lexicon. Few, however, speak of binge reading. To understand why this is regrettable, mute Netflix long enough to read Adam Garfinkle’s “The Erosion of Deep Literacy” in National Affairs. He believes that because of the displacement of reading by digital, usually pictorial entertainment and communication, “something neurophysiological” is happening to individuals, and especially to the “neural pathways” of the young. And something vital to democratic culture is waning.

Garfinkle, founding editor of the American Interest, elaborates on Maryanne Wolf’s idea of “deep literacy” from her 2018 book “Reader, Come Home.” Garfinkle defines this (or “deep reading”) as engagement with “an extended piece of writing” in a way that draws the reader into “a dialectical process with the text.” This involves the reader in anticipation of the author’s “direction and meaning.”

Few scientists doubt that heavy dependency on electronic screens has shortened attention spans. “We know,” Garfinkle says, “that prolonged and repetitive exposure to digital devices changes the way we think and behave in part because it changes us physically.”

The brain is continuously rewiring itself in response to changing stimuli, and 200,000 years of evolution did not suit it to process today’s torrents of fleeting stimuli.

“More items vie for our attention in a given hour,” Garfinkle says, “than our ancestors had to handle in a day or even a week.” Becoming comfortable with shallow attention to everything, people become transfixed by the present, unable to remember, or to plan well. He reports that high school guidance counselors say most students lack the social skills to speak one-on-one with college admissions personnel. This, Garfinkle believes, reflects “acquired social autism.”

People immersed in digital torrents acquire “self-inflicted attention deficits.” They become incapable of the “quality attention” that deep literacy requires. Such literacy is, in evolutionary terms, a recent innovation that changed brain circuitry. Garfinkle says, “We are or become, cognitively speaking, what we do with language.” Printed words, presented sequentially in sentences and paragraphs, are demanding, but rewarding: Only they can present the reasoning required to establish complicated truths.

Garfinkle’s surmise is that government’s problem-solving failures reflect not just hyper-partisanship and polarization but also the thin thinking of a political class of non-deep readers who are comfortable only with the shallowness of tweets. Instantaneous digital interactions encourage superficiality, insularity and tribalism.

Deep reading, like deep writing, is difficult, hence unnatural. It is unpleasant to those who, tethered to their devices, have become accustomed to lives that are surface straight through. Garfinkle worries that “cognitively sped-up and multitasking young brains may not acquire sufficient capacities for critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy, and hence will become easy prey for charlatans and demagogues.”

Modernity’s greatest blessing — individualism: the celebration of individual agency — depends on a sense of one’s interior, of self-consciousness. This is facilitated by deep literacy that, unlike the oral communication of premodern groups, requires solitude for the reader’s private repose. Modernity, and eventually democracy, advanced through Protestantism’s emphasis of individual engagement with writing — the Bible made accessible to personal reading in various languages.

Integral to liberal-democratic politics are, Garfinkle says, abstract ideas — “representation; the virtues of doubt, dissent, and humility; and the concept of a depersonalized constitutional order.” A society that loses the ballast of deep literacy is apt to become less thoughtful, more emotional and volatile. It will become impatient with the pace of refined, impersonal governance through institutions. It will seek “a less abstract, re-personalized form of social and political authority concentrated in a ‘great’ authoritarian leader.”

Deep literacy has always been a minority taste and attainment, but is always necessary, especially among elites, to leaven majoritarian politics. But because of today’s social media technologies, Garfinkle believes, there is increased, if superficial and emotive, participation in political discourse. Yet even among young people in higher education, many professors will not assign entire books, or substantial portions of challenging ones.

Deep readers can “deploy shields of skepticism” against those who, lacking the reading habit, are “locked in perpetual intellectual adolescence.” And then? “Populism of the illiberal nationalist kind is,” Garfinkle believes, “what happens in a mass-electoral democracy when a decisive percentage of mobilized voters drops below a deep-literacy standard.”

Garfinkle’s essay – mental calisthenics for a confined nation – deserves at least the grudging gratitude of even the most egalitarian Americans. It requires what it describes – deep literacy – and might be a spur to binge reading.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-we-lost-when-we-stopped-binge-reading/2020/04/16/d440d7ba-8005-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html