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Motivated Avoidance
Published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the report shows that people who know very little about an issue—say the economic downturn, changes in the climate or dwindling fossil fuel reserves—tend to avoid learning more about it. This insulates them in their ignorance—a pattern described by researchers as “motivated avoidance.” Read the full article here.Read More
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A Melancholy Accident
From John Latta’s blog post yesterday—an eloquent (as usual) meditation on several related themes, which ends with this quotation from Thoreau‘s Walden: Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over—and it will be called, and will…Read More
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News that Doesn’t Stay News, or The Meaning of “Is”
The Abstract from a study recently published by the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University: The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding.Read More
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Another Simple Desultory Philippic*
One doesn’t have to look to the Paris Review or Poetry Magazine or The New York Review of Books for profound insight. Here’s a bit of wisdom from an interview with Sam Hamill—”poet, publisher, editor and translator, [who] co-founded the Copper Canyon Press in 1972″—published online at The Kearney Hub in Kearney, Nebraska. Hamill remarks: “The way of poetry […] shows us that our lives are simply an instrument of our practice. If we alter our practice, we change our lives.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
