Another best of ‘25 list

Fresh Air's book critic says her picks tilt a bit to nonfiction, but the novels that made the cut redress the imbalance by their sweep and intensity. Karen Russell's The Antidote was her favorite.

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/08/nx-s1-5634019/best-books-2025-maureen-corrigan?utm_social_post_id=635253313&utm_social_handle_id=9173694336003200&utm_medium=social&utm_source=threads.net&utm_term=nprnews&utm_campaign=npr

Better thinkers

Studying philosophy does make people better thinkers, according to new research on more than 600,000 college grads.

https://buff.ly/SWhY0c0

the task of education

"Like Rousseau, Kant criticizes parents who have their children taught solely with an eye to their career prospects and making money, and rulers who see schools and universities as nothing more than training grounds to maximize the efficiency of their subjects. Instead, it is the task of education to improve the world by turning individuals into better people: "Good education is exactly that from which all good in the world arises." "

— Kant: A Revolution in Thinking by Marcus Willaschek

I Teach College Students How to Argue With Their Families

Good advice for the classroom, too:

…Few things can calm a savage heart like being genuinely listened to. Keep listening. Ask constructive questions. No reactions, not yet. Unless the speaker has a political psychopathology going on (which, in the current environment, is not as rare as it should be), he will soften. His voice will modulate; he'll stop sweating.

Now, finally, it's your turn. Speak your piece. Be detached, genial, even kind, but say what's on your mind. Prefix fraught opinions with a simple qualifier. "I might be wrong, but …."

I might be wrong: It's simple to the point of banality, but in my experience, highly effective.

Prepare by doing research. Do some reading. Be respectful. If you can create a rich, humane conversation, you may learn something. As Emerson says, "Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn from him."

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/opinion/jacques-lacan-holiday-arguments.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Nothing serious

I can relate.

"Our University moreover inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort, so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all—reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month. During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels, which, strange to say, I had never attacked before. I don't like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but for infallible veracity concerning human nature, and absolute simplicity of method, he makes all the other writers of novels and plays seem like children."

"The Letters of William James, Vol. II": https://a.co/7orKwS6

Artificial learning

Cautionary warning for my upcoming Philosophy in Recent American Fiction course:

"All I want for Christmas is to have my brain scrubbed of the memory of teaching a university-level literature course where most students used AI to tell them what the books were about and then also used AI to tell me what they thought about the books."

https://www.threads.com/@annasandyelrod/post/DSfpbY_iSuF?xmt=AQF0tMZ1NskaVYuYlU8maJd3ef_ngVHjxLuJ9bGQUAaJ2UyhV1ab79qOALAYfukA4ftq8Xa5&slof=1

Popular check-outs

What were the most popular books checked out in US libraries in 2025? Here are the top fiction and nonfiction titles across 40 libraries.

https://bookriot.com/the-most-popular-books-in-us-public-libraries-in-2025/