Latest news with #MoreThanWords
Boston Globe
25-04-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Spring cleaning? Here's where to donate to do the most good.
Advertisement Catie's Closet This Dracut-based organization creates shopping experiences for kids living in poverty: They turn unused areas inside schools into discreet spaces where kids can browse for free clothing, toiletries, and other basics. Donate Prom attire, dress shirts, ties, hoodies, dresses, tank tops, shorts, joggers, and leggings. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Sign up for Parenting Unfiltered. Globe staff #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Subscribe * indicates required E-mail * The Children's Room This Arlington group offers grief support for families — several friends have benefited from their community after the death of a parent. They need gender-neutral, blank journals, as well as art supplies: Sharpies, washable markers, stickers, stamps, poster boards, scissors, decorative tape and papers, and paint brushes. Circle of Hope Needham's Circle of Hope provides kids and adults experiencing homelessness with clothing and hygiene essentials. They make regular deliveries of clothing, coats, shoes, bedding, and hygiene essentials to 32 partner shelters and clinics. Give them gently used T-shirts, sweaters, flannel shirts, sweats, shorts, sports bras, baby, and maternity clothes. Advertisement Fresh Start Furniture Bank This Hudson-based organization distributes kid-friendly plastic dishes and cups, utensils, appliances, good-condition linens and towels, decorative pillows, framed artwork, and all sorts of furniture. They even pick up in several Metro West locations. Friends of the Homeless of the South Shore Based in Weymouth, this group needs like-new home essentials — sheets, blankets, curtains, area rugs — plus non-perishables like soup, pasta, coffee, and tea. Call 781-340-1604 to schedule a donation drop-off. Household Goods Acton's Household Goods donates high-quality furniture and household items to 2,500 families each year. Need to streamline your linens, kitchen items, or sheets and towels? This is your place. They also accept tables, chairs, and other furniture. Mission of Deeds This Reading-based organization furnishes homes for people in need, with a focus on kitchenware, matching kitchen and dining room chairs, lamps, ironing boards, and more. Plus, they offer pickup in various towns north of Boston. More Than Words I love the mission: This nonprofit, youth-run online and retail bookstore in Boston and Waltham is staffed by kids who are in foster care, homeless, or involved in the court system. Donate all genres of books (less than 10 years old), plus LPs, clothes, jewelry, used (but intact) games, artwork, and lots more. Schedule a pickup or browse their many drop-off locations. New American Association of Massachusetts (NAAM) Advertisement Based in Lowell and Lynn, NAAM makes the transition to the United States a little easier with staples like Chromebooks or other laptops in working condition, plus backpacks, diapers, strollers, and baby formula. Savers Savers is a thrift retailer with branches throughout the region. Their motto hits close to my (overfilled) home: 'Declutter responsibly.' They accept a wide array of donations, from housewares and clothing to electronics to stuffed animals (a rare find!), with many drop-off locations. South Shore Stars This youth-development agency, with a brand-new school for dyslexic learners, needs supplies for their centers in Quincy, Randolph, and Weymouth, geared to kids six weeks to middle school: tops and bottoms; shoes; and seasonal clothing like sandals, bathing suits, and rain jackets. Call 781-340-5109 to arrange a drop-off time. StoryTime Crafts This Needham-based group champions literacy and equitable access to education by partnering with schools in under-resourced communities. They need new and gently used books for preschool up to eighth grade. Their Needham book slot is open daily. Kara Baskin can be reached at
Boston Globe
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Looking for romance? Check your local bookstore.
Rosen, the former bookselling editor at Publishers Weekly, says romance and bookstores seem to go hand-in-hand lately; some have even gone exclusive. According to a July article in The New York Times, the number of US bookstores dedicated to romance novels has steadily climbed from just two into double digits in the last two years. Local additions include Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'I think during the [COVID-19 pandemic], people just wanted something to make them happy,' Rosen said. Related : Advertisement But now, it's not just the love stories on the shelves stealing the spotlight — IRL romance, happening inside bookstores, is having a moment of its own. In 'Bookstore Romance,' Rosen explores the ways booksellers and the betrothed have come together in unlikely and surprising ways, from one bride's 'Beauty and the Beast' dream come true to a surprise proposal between the Psychology and Self-Help sections. While most pairs share a love for literature, others — on and off the pages of Rosen's book — have sought out booksellers who also align with core values, such as building and rebuilding community. 'People are becoming more socially aware of their place in the world. They want to give back, they want to do something unique, they don't want to go the traditional route anymore,' said Liz Saul, associate director of events at booksellers and literary nonprofit More Than Words. Advertisement Saul said the bookstore wedding movement is the 'new bread and butter' of multi-location, youth-run stores. Their South End location reemerged from the lull of the pandemic as a popular spot for gatherings, hosting more than 20 weddings since 'coming back to life as an event space' in 2023. Many couples who were drawn to the space value the organization's mission of supporting and empowering youth, but for some, 'their first date was in a bookstore, or they have some sort of special connection to [bookstores] to begin with,' Saul explained. For Kaylah Dixon and Nick Hammes, it was both. The couple met as undergrad students living on the North Shore, and began dating during a production of 'Urinetown,' bonding over their love of the arts. In 2020, they postponed their wedding, eventually marrying in 2022 at More Than Words, after Kaylah's job in community theater connected her with the organization. The couple resonated with the nonprofit's youth program and advocacy efforts and the literary element it would bring to their celebration. 'I love looking at a bookshelf and just picking something off of it and getting lost somewhere … and you think, 'I can't wait to share this with the people around me,'' Hammes said. A setup for a potential wedding at More Than Words in Boston's South End. @warrenlanephotography On their big day, the two wanted to encapsulate their love of all kinds of media — film, books, musicals, and plays — and created a display dedicated to the favorites that shaped them through the years. Titles included 'The Color Purple,' 'Twelfth Night,' 'Homegoing,' 'Mamma Mia!,' the 'Avatar' DVDs, and 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.' Authors and playwrights the couple admired dictated the seating arrangements. Advertisement For Melissa Fetter, owner, and Serena Hanlin, private events coordinator, of The Beacon Hill Books + Cafe. Beacon Hill Books + Cafe ? Those who want more personalized experiences can pay $250 per hour for exclusive use of the space for the proposal and a photo shoot after the store's regular closing hours, Fetter said. The location itself can also be reserved and rented for wedding celebrations, including rehearsal dinners, bridal showers, and receptions. These private events include staffing (such as a sommelier and servers), table settings, andfloral arrangements, often made by Hanlin herself. A wedding celebration will typically cost around $10,000, according to Fetter. 'The experience of having the whole bookstore as your private space — it feels like you're at someone's family home,' Hanlin said. 'One of my favorite compliments that we get at the dinners is 'It's even more beautiful than I could have imagined.' That's my gold standard, I always want to hear that.' Advertisement In the case of Morgan Brewton-Johnson and Sam Hall, the couple was looking for something 'quintessentially Boston' for their small local wedding. Brewton-Johnson had learned about Beacon Hill Books from one of her graduate school professors, and it became a go-to spot for the couple. Beacon Hill Books + Cafe. Beacon Hill Books + Cafe? For their November wedding, the two spent the morning together — exchanging vows and rings on the couch at home — before taking an Uber to the bookstore to greet their 20-so guests. '[The wedding day] is the way I would have wanted to spend every single day anyway, so it was nice that we got to do that on the day we committed ourselves to each other with our friends and family,' said Brewton-Johnson. Guests were each given a book, handpicked by the couple, as a wedding favor. So, are bookstore weddings the start of a happily ever after? Rosen thinks so. 'To be surrounded by stories, it's kind of a lovely way to begin the story of your life together,' said Rosen. 'Combining the stories, the beauty of the bookstore, I think it's just so nice. I know I'm biased … but the people in bookstores are so lovely.' Judith Rosen will discuss 'Bookstore Romance: Love Speaks Volumes' with author Laura Zigman at , 44 Brattle St., Cambridge, on Feb. 27 at 7 p.m. Haley Clough can be reached at
Yahoo
04-02-2025
- Yahoo
Against the Bullshit Machines
How to Think About Writing in the Age of AIby John WarnerBasic Books, 320 pp., $30 LATELY, EVERY COLLEGE ENGLISH TEACHER I KNOW has been struggling to write an 'AI policy.' Even in using that language—and this is one of many excellent points that John Warner makes in his galvanizing new book, More Than Words—we give up too much conceptual ground. LLMs aren't intelligent, either artificially or in any other way. They cannot 'write' the papers that students coax out of them, because, as Warner argues, 'Large language models do not 'write.' They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity.' Nor did they 'read' the texts on which they were trained (and 'trained' itself is arguably another misnomer). They solve a probability problem—what words are more likely to appear next to other words, given set constraints—at impressive speeds as reservoirs of drinking water are repurposed to cool enormous server racks. As Warner himself puts it: 'Fetching tokens based on weighted probabilities is not the same process as what happens when humans write.' The LLM, he concludes in his opening salvo, is thus a machine that produces 'bullshit' in the Harry Frankfurt sense of the term: content to which truth or falsehood are simply irrelevant criteria. Warner's latest is a thoughtful, deft, and funny argument about what writing is, why machines can't do it, and why we should therefore continue giving the young and old many chances to learn it. It is Warner's third book about higher education, by my count, and his third about the teaching of writing. (He has also written a novel and a book of short stories, and he is a humorist of some repute, at least among us younger Gen X-ers who used to forward his McSweeney's squibs to our least disliked co-workers.) In 2019, he published Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, which has become something of a cult favorite among college writing teachers. That next year, he published The Writer's Practice, a useful textbook. The year after that, he produced Sustainable. Resilient. Free., which proposes that we treat all college as a form of infrastructure: modestly budgeted, service oriented, and free to all, much as certain enlightened state governments now treat community college. He also writes a weekly book column for the Chicago Tribune and a Substack. (Perhaps his next book can cover time management.) What, to Warner, is writing? It's what happens when you simultaneously express and explore an idea, discovering, as you go along, whether in successive sentences that demur from and argue with each other or in the successive drafts by which you first stage the debate and then hide it away, what you actually do and don't think. Warner's account of the ways we use writing to think is warm, personal, illustrated with his own on-point anecdotes. He argues here and elsewhere for the value of good teaching, but his best argument is carried in the memories: the passionate eccentric who mentored Warner through MFA school and once called him on the phone, at home, to gently explain to Warner that he had used the word 'penultimate' incorrectly in class; the elementary school teacher who made Warner's entire class write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then forced them all to follow their own directions to the letter and eat the messy results. We think using all sorts of modalities, of course—there are innumerable ways in which the average member of an illiterate, isolated Amazonian tribe is smarter than I am; intelligence is contextual, and I have no idea what berries will and won't kill me. But because writing freezes and objectifies our thoughts, it's a uniquely powerful tool for getting a little ironic distance from them. Equally, writing can sometimes reveal our feelings to us, even elicit them, as if from nowhere, as Warner illustrates with a powerful story about how a small plot twist in his novel, The Funny Man (2011), allowed him to fully grieve the death of his father: 'Writing that scene, five years on, I cried harder than I ever had at the time of my father's death.' Feelings are even stranger than thoughts, if indeed the two can be distinguished—to me, they feel like different states of the same matter. And, in addition to being a way to think and to feel, it's a practice, an accretion of discrete skills, experiences, and habits of mind. Obviously, machines can do none of this, and we don't need them to. The whole project is strangely beside the point, as though we built a machine that could harvest our food and then built another machine to consume, digest, and excrete it, and then gave over much of the world's arable land to this project. Support our independent political and cultural journalism by signing up for a free or paid Bulwark subscription. I APPRECIATE EVERY WORD THAT WARNER WRITES, and yet as I read his books about teaching, I always feel a mounting anxiety and impatience—not his fault, but occasioned by him. He articulates simply and clearly what is distinctive about the work that students do when they start to truly use writing as a tool for thinking, and the role that teachers can play in making that happen; as a first-year writing teacher, I read these passages and feel vindicated. And then, as the examples and stories multiply, each of them throwing yet another precious accomplishment of this nation's historically unique (and increasingly imperiled) higher-education system into relief, I start to feel as though I'm counting all our potential losses, too—all the opportunities that will be lost if English 101 goes the way of, say, high-school Latin. And I think, Everything Warner is saying is true, but the people who need to understand it have a professional interest in not doing so. Warner makes this point rather forcefully by comparing the current hyping of LLMs to the now-forgotten hyping of Massive Open Online Courses a decade ago. The will to 'disrupt' higher education seems to run far ahead of the means. It will continue looking for them. Warner himself summarizes my anxiety, right at the beginning of the book: Deep down, I believe that ChatGPT by itself cannot kill anything worth preserving. My concern is that out of convenience, or expedience, or through carelessness, we may allow these meaningful things to be lost or reduced to the province of a select few rather than being accessible to all. 'Worth preserving' is a key phrase here. One of Warner's most important arguments, which he made at greater length in Why They Can't Write, is that we have already given over too much of the writing teacher's time, especially at the elementary and secondary levels, to activities that aren't worth preserving—to things that the robots actually can do just fine. To write an essay that contains exactly one thesis, with three subclaims separated by commas, which each correspond to the topic sentence of the body paragraphs, and which is kept rigorously free from any personal insights (your teachers won't know how to grade those anyway): We probably can leave this as an exercise for machines. They're good at reproducing empty formalisms. Both Republican and Democratic administrations, both the public and private sector, have colluded in reducing English class to this sort of exercise, though of our two parties—The Supporters of a Chastened Oligarchy With Many Democratic Characteristics on one side, and the Supporters of an Oligarchy That Drives 125 in a School Zone on the other—it's obvious whose agenda this system best serves. As for me, I don't want to be some ketamine-addicted tech guy's stenographer, and I want my students to have better options as well. The 'AI' policy on which I finally landed was thus an outright ban of ChatGPT and similar programs for any purposes other than copyediting. I justified it with these words: 'The point of this class is to equip you to write better than a robot.' I enforce it—in the absence of any remotely reliable 'AI writing detector'—by giving failing grades to bullshit. Send this review to someone with whom you've discussed the fate of writing in light of advances in AI. Share
