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Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Angus Fletcher, "Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature" (Simon & Schuster, 2021)
Description: Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere--from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others--each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature's great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature (Simon & Schuster, 2021) reviews the blueprints for twenty-five o...