It won the 1942 Caldecott Medal for McCloskey’s illustrations, executed in charcoal then lithographed on zinc plates. The book’s reputation led to the construction of a statue by Nancy Schön in the Public Garden of the mom duck and her eight ducklings, which is a well-liked destination for children and adults alike. In 1991, Barbara Bush gave a replica of this sculpture to Raisa Gorbacheva as a part of the START Treaty, and the work is displayed in Moscow’s Novodevichy Park. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved appropriate, and from our hyperactive, knowledge-stoked minds will spring a golden age of mental discovery and universal wisdom. Then once more, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and though it may exchange the printing press, it produces one thing altogether different. The type of deep studying that a sequence of printed pages promotes is effective not only for the data we acquire from the creator’s phrases however for the mental vibrations these words set off inside our personal minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted studying of a guide, or by another act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our personal inferences and analogies, foster our personal ideas.
Mr. and Mrs. Mallard agree to meet at the Public Garden in a single week. In the meantime, Mrs. Mallard teaches the eight ducklings all they should know about being ducks, such as swimming, diving, marching alongside, and to avoid dangers such as bicycles and other wheeled objects. First published in 1941 by the Viking Press, the book tells the story of a pair of mallards who raise their brood of ducklings on an island within the lagoon within the Boston Public Garden.
His imaginative and prescient was failing, and preserving his eyes centered on a web page had become exhausting and painful, typically bringing on crushing complications. He had been compelled to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to provide it up. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was in a position to write along with his eyes closed, utilizing only the information of his fingers. Reading, explains Wolf, just isn’t an instinctive ability for human beings. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand.
Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep pondering. The idea that our minds should operate as excessive-speed knowledge-processing machines isn’t solely constructed into the workings of the Internet, it is the community’s reigning business mannequin as well. The quicker we surf across the Web—the extra links we click and pages we view—the more alternatives Google and other firms acquire to gather information about us and to feed us commercials. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a monetary stake in collecting the crumbs of knowledge we leave behind as we flit from hyperlink to link—the more crumbs, the higher. The last item these firms want is to encourage leisurely studying or sluggish, concentrated thought. Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.
My thoughts would get caught up within the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through lengthy stretches of prose. Now my focus usually starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, start in search of one thing else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain again to the textual content.