Links for September 27, 2019

How To Pay Attention

Educator Jennifer L. Roberts has described an assignment she’s used in art history classes as making students regard a single work for “a painfully long time.” This seems to mean three hours, which does sound like a challenge.... Roberts argues, persuasively, that it’s a highly useful step. Students resist, but eventually find that looking really slowly forces them to notice things they had initially missed.


How “Peanuts” Created a Space for Thinking

I wonder if Brecht would have loved Lucy best, as I do. Born into “Peanuts” as a “fussbudget,” she soon became a prime mover behind the strip’s conflict and Charlie Brown’s feelings of disillusionment. Lucy is assertive, nervy, confident, stubborn, and manipulative; she can moon over a beau and still excoriate him for his inattentiveness. And, despite her near-constant bluster, she is a person who feels profound pain. In the Sunday strip for June 30, 1963, she feels low and rages, “I’ve never had anything, and I never will have anything!” Linus patiently replies, “Well, for one thing, you have a little brother who loves you.” And Lucy, her reserves spent, cries in his arms.