Looking for something to read this weekend? We’ve scoured the web for thought-provoking articles and interviews. Enjoy!

Paul Tough’s recent piece for The New York Times emphasizes that scholastic success is a product of difficult-to-measure noncognitive skills. These are

“a set of emotional and psychological habits and mind-sets that enable children to negotiate life effectively inside and outside of school: the ability to understand and follow direction; to focus on a single activity for an extended period; to interact calmly with other students; to cope with disappointment and persevere through frustration.”

For children living in poverty, these capacities are especially hard to cultivate. But, as Tough explains, we can create the conditions for fostering noncognitive skills in children by supporting their parents. “If we want to improve children’s opportunities for success,” he writes,

“one of the most powerful potential levers for change is not the children themselves, but rather the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of the adults who surround them [. . .] When parents get the support they need to create a warm, stable, nurturing environment at home, their children’s stress levels often go down, while their emotional stability and psychological resilience improve.”

Read it along with Tara Pringle Jefferson’s essay on bringing Maya Angelou’s poetry to single moms in Cleveland.

Elsewhere on the Internet

Does reading make you more attractive?

MIT’s Sloan Management Review takes on what makes work meaningful.

David Giffels’ essay on LeBron James and Homeric epic – originally published in Books@Work book The Hard Way On Purpose – is available for free at Lit Hub.

How reading poetry “[enables] the reader to reflect on and review their own experiences.”  

This article on “deep work” and creativity has tips for cultivating the state – as well as a reminder that many workers would welcome the chance to be creative, in the first place.

Ainehi Edoro describes four times African writers rewrote a western classic and nailed it in the Guardian this week.

Krista Tippett’s interview with StoryCorps’ David Isay reminds us that “listening is an act of love.”

On the story as an “agent for personal transformation.”

Image: Barthélemy d’Eyck, Still Life with Books in a Niche, c.1442-45, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading:

Story at Work: Making Space for Shared Experiences

Just Listen: A Simple Tool for Minimizing Bias and Transforming Relationships

One Book, Three Contexts: The Pleasure of Different Perspectives

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