When Agate “Aggie” Hayes, a spirited and outdoorsy 10-year-old who sketches birds and climbs trees too high, unintentionally causes a devastating fire, she flees in an inflatable boat and hides out in the backwoods, riddled with guilt, dodging bird dogs, and evading rescue. She survives on cattails, salmonberries, and her own instincts and resourcefulness—until someone […]
English major Matthew Jockers wasn’t always a computer whiz. The new dean of the WSU College of Arts and Sciences recalls a class in high school in which he struggled to program a mainframe to print out his name. “It was that tricky,” he says. A love of reading, writing, and literature led him to […]
Plato is sitting at the feet of his mentor Socrates, writing down what the old philosopher says. What Socrates is saying, ironically, is that writing is bad for you: It rots your memory. Preserved in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates’s opinion of the then-emerging technology sounds strange to us now—until you recall that that’s pretty much exactly […]