Iwas an English major in college, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand why I should pay to study literature when I knew how to read and could do so more happily on my own time. Like many others, ...

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. When you’re assigned a text, ...

In the 21st century, the practice of close reading has become synonymous with approaching a book as an artifact to decode—the idea that the blue curtains can never just be blue curtains. In Close ...

W hen I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, it was a rite of passage for all English majors to discover that they had entirely misunderstood Robert Frost’s most famous poem “The Road Not Taken” ( ...

With more information than ever at our fingertips, there’s a sense of rush to take it all in and “skim.” Here's what the experts say about our reading habits—and whether you should change them. Though ...

The invention of close reading. By transforming quotations into evidence, close reading served as way to turn postwar criticism into a specialized knowledge. But what if we treated it more as an art ...

Hollowed out. That’s how I frequently described West Virginia University during the nine years I worked there before leaving this summer. There was a library, but it bought fewer and fewer books. The ...