psychology dector

One of the voices I’ve missed in this crazy election season is David Carr’s.   He was The New York Times media reporter and author of The Night of the Gun:  A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own.   (Simon & Schuster, 2009).   He would have something to say about the way the media has covered Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and how each candidate has manipulated those same media outlets in return.   It has been quite a feeding frenzy, and Carr would know what to make of it and possibly, how to make sense of it. Working in an academic institution, I am struck by the kind of snobbery those in the ivory tower have for journalists.   Evidently, it is more courageous and intellectual to research and write a paper on some obtuse and disconnected corner of the universe than it is to go out into the desert embedded with American soldiers and report back on the war against ISIS.   When one teacher heard that I called myself a...

“I began as I would go on—reading.”   Talk about fantastic first sentences.   Those words begin Robert Gottlieb’s memoir, Avid Reader:   A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) and they immediately establish that even though Gottlieb has worked his entire life as an editor, first at Simon and Schuster, then at Knopf, and after that, at The New Yorker followed up with freelance editing, service to the board of the New York City Ballet, and finally, as a writer, he remains at heart a reader.   He has edited everything and everyone, from literature to trash, and he recounts in detail the struggles and triumphs of the written word shaped by a writer and a good editor. The story begins at the beginning with a tale of how a boy became a reader and then an editor.   It is full of magic moments with books and texts, and for the diehard book-lover who thrives on the printed word, there is a lot to be thrilled about in this book.   Gottlieb reinforces the idea th...

To write a research paper—one that includes peer-reviewed journals, books, and other sources gathered together and analyzed to come to some specific conclusions about the subject studied—one needs a research question.   The question is everything because it kicks off the search for information and evidence, and it will later become the paper’s thesis.   I ask myself, what do I want to know?   What intrigues me?   To write research one has to have an inquiring mind.   It is not a passive act.   Even in the most esoteric subject, the writer must find something of interest, some way into the research.   If it is an exercise to fulfill a requirement, it will read like an exercise to fulfill a requirement.   So, the research question is the equivalent of the Big Bang of a writer’s journey to write something true and meaningful and intelligent.   It is the all-too-crucial starting point. I usually wind up rewriting my research question and thesis ...

Writing a memoir is hard work.   It is also dangerous, as people who look bad in the book might just track you down to reassert their version of how things unfolded.   Families have blown apart; friendships have disintegrated; more importantly, people have been sued.   Writers don’t make enough to be fighting court battles with those who object to their characterization in a memoir of childhood where the author seeks revenge against those who bullied and tormented.   Writing memoir is hard work because the truth really is stranger than fiction, and a memoir uses fictional techniques to convey memories and reflections, and yes, the history of us.   How do we convey a narrative when things do not always end neat and tidy?   And, whose version of the truth is, well, true?   Could there be multiple versions of truth, like the infamous Rashomon , the epic film of Akira Kurosawa? Meredith Maran, in her recent book, Why We Write About Ourselves:  Twenty...