i count the moments when your hand finds mine,small clockwork measures that unseat the dark.your smile, a ledger, balances the day;your voice, an ordered tide, refines my thought.i learn the grammar of your silences,repay them with a careful, steady ear.we argue, not to wound, but to be clearer;we fail, then practice courage like a craft.

Sue Roe’s In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art is a capacious, elegiac portrait of a place and a moment. It threads biography, cultural history, and close-looking criticism to argue that Montmartre — with its cafés, studios, cheap lodgings and convivial degradations — was not merely backdrop but active engine of a seismic aesthetic shift. The book reads as both a social history and a curated salon: intimate enough to register personality, broad enough to trace artistic, technological, and social forces that made modernism possible.

i’m not sure what love is,but i can list its ridiculous perks. i love a grin that sneaks up like a catand ambushes my morning coffee.i love eyes that play hide-and-seekwith the important bits of my face. i love hands that high-five and then apologizefor being so good at holding things.i love hugs that smuggle marshmallows…

In an era dominated by digital media, media and information literacy—the competencies to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act with information across media—should be treated as a foundational skill alongside reading and numeracy. International frameworks frame media literacy as a teachable, scaffoldable competency that can and should be embedded into core curricula rather than treated as an optional add-on. …

Jim Robison’s Slab Techniques is a concise, unpretentious primer that manages the useful trick of being both immediately practical and quietly provocative. Presented as part of the Ceramics Handbooks series, the book lays out slab building not as a single method but as a family of choices — a toolkit of decisions about clay, joinery, structure and surface that invites the reader to think like a maker while learning the mechanical fundamentals.

i'm not sure what love is; i know its shadow.it is the appetite that wakes at midnight,a small, precise hunger that learns your shapeand traces the hollows where light once lived. i love the way you keep a pocket of achelike a coin for later—found and folded in.your smile is not bright so much as necessary,

Tony Robbins’s Awaken the Giant Within (first issued in the early 1990s) is, at once, a manifesto, a handbook, and a revival meeting. Framed as a program for total self-mastery, it stitches together memoiristic anecdote, high-velocity exhortation, practical exercises and a bricolage of psychological techniques into a single, capacious work aimed at producing measurable change in the reader’s life. The book’s form and ambitions are characteristic of the late-20th-century self-help boom: expansive in scope, prescriptive in tone, and unapologetically oriented toward results.

i’ve never defined love.i catalogue it. a smile that docks my breath,eyes that hide a whole country,hands that read the weather of my skin. a laugh that licenses my absurdity,words that pry open rooms i’d closed,arguments that teach me tenderness. artists who give themselves away,courage that mistakes itself into invention,a heart under renovation.

Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All reads like a party thrown by a philosopher with a taste for slapstick and haute cuisine — simultaneously exuberant and argumentative, mischievous and serious. The author is less interested in plotting than in setting ideas loose: the novel delights in collisions — between high and low culture, sacred and profane, the corporeal and the metaphysical — and in watching what happens when those collisions yield sparks.

i’m not sure what love is,only what it does. i love a smile that tugs me under—an invitation, small and blunt—so my mouth answers with a borrowed grin,so my chest rehearses missing before you leave. i love the eyes that keep a templebehind their light, a place I want to baptize myself inand learn the slow map of your scars.

Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre remains one of the electric high points of nineteenth-century poetry: a feverish voyage-vision that reads like an ecstatic manifesto of modern sensibility. Composed when Rimbaud was still a teenager (1871), the poem stages a radical collapse of the speaking subject into an object-world, using the figure of a wayward boat to choreograph a sustained exploration of freedom, intoxication, and speech itself.

Where the poem hides The binding cradles the pages—waiting to be filled. A postage stamp of Plutoglares from the corner, cancelled in an impossible year. Like a sculptor, I believethe medium can hold the art; the paper opens consulatesfor things that have no lobby. Study the lines and textures;the surface negotiates treaties with ink and moons.

Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell reads like a small, incandescent apocalypse: a compact, fiercely personal document in which a young poet brutalizes his own mythology and attempts — in the same breath — to transfigure failure into art. It is not a comfortable book. It is stubborn, querulous, visionary, and often unbearably intimate: part confession, part indictment, part fever dream.

Where the poem hides The binding cradles the pages—waiting to be filled. A pencil nickpricks the margin like a ridiculous wart. Like a sculptor, I believethe medium can hold the art;I tap, I shave, I whistle at my mistakes. Study the lines and textures;the surface is coy. The nick keeps secrets:a stub of an idea, a failed comma, a joke.

Abstract. Critical Theory, originating with the Frankfurt School, offers educators analytic tools that move students beyond surface reading to interrogate how texts and media reproduce power. This article argues that integrating core critical concepts—ideology critique, the culture industry, reification, and reflexivity—into curriculum design produces measurable gains in critical literacy, civic agency, and equity-centred pedagogy. I outline a brief intellectual genealogy, translate theory into three classroom-ready practices, suggest assessment methods, and respond to common institutional objections.

Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters is a lucid, humane intervention in a long-running scientific and philosophical conversation about what it means to be “intelligent.” Framed as reporting and cultural history rather than polemic, the book stitches vivid field scenes, archival excavation, and interviews into an argument: plants exhibit a range of sensing, signalling, and adaptive behaviours that deserve conceptual and ethical attention from scientists and the public alike.

Where the poem hides The binding cradles the pages—waiting to be filled. A coffee ringblooms at the margin, brown and patient. Like a sculptor, I believethe medium can hold the art;but stains are maps of small betrayals,old weather pressed into paper. Study the lines and textures;the surface keeps its secrets. The ring knowsthe lateness of hands, the small relentings.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet reads like a distilled apprenticeship in attention. What began as a sequence of private replies (written between 1903–1908) to an earnest novice, Franz Xaver Kappus, has become a canonical pocket-manual for anyone who considers making their inner life the material of art. The book’s power lies not in technical instruction but in the author’s sustained moral and poetic insistence that creativity is an inward work of cultivation rather than a craft of tricks.

Critical theory offers a powerful framework for aligning the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (IB‑MYP) with democratic education, social justice, and critical inquiry. This article synthesizes foundational scholarship in critical pedagogy with implementation‑ready strategies for curriculum design, assessment, governance, and professional development. A phased pilot model, performance rubrics, and interdisciplinary planning structures are proposed to support sustainable reform. The article argues that when critical theory is operationalized through concrete classroom practices and measurable outcomes, the IB‑MYP can become a transformative space for cultivating critically conscious and socially engaged learners.

Where the poem hides The binding cradles leaves of paper—a small, patient architecture.They wait for ink like ponds wait for rain. Like a sculptor I work by touch:press, subtract, fold—believing the mediumwill keep the shape I make. Study the lines — the grain, the seam, the thumbprint;the surface has its private weather. Only an impulse — sudden as wind —lifts the poem from the page and lets it fallout into the room.

Interview with the Vampire presents itself as a confessional document — a long, elegiac first-person recollection — and through that frame Anne Rice re-animates the Gothic tradition for the late twentieth century. The novel is less a catalogue of monstrous deeds than an extended meditation on consciousness, loss, and moral solitude. Its vampires are not merely predators; they are reflective beings whose immortality intensifies the human problems of identity, desire, and meaning.

The binding cradles the pages—waiting to be filled. Like a sculptor, I believethe medium can hold the art. Study the lines and textures;the surface keeps its secrets. Only impulse freesthe poem from the page.

James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy is a curious hybrid: part travelogue, part parable, part self-help tract. It reads like a modern myth packaged as a quest narrative — a protagonist (an everyman narrator) follows a trail of clues to an ancient manuscript in Peru and, in the process, encounters a sequence of “insights” promising a new way to read coincidence, energy, and human relationships.

Before I knew a God (a small cosmic report) Before I knew a god there was a river —not content with flowing, it kept minutes: payroll, ledger, current accounts.I leaned my ear to its transaction (it hummed in prime numbers),and the lark — hired that morning as a punctuation mark —sang a footnote so precise the clouds corrected their margins.

Emily Reason’s Ceramics for Beginners: Wheel Throwing arrives — or feels as if it arrives — at the crossroads between a how-to manual and a cultivated meditation on craft. On the surface it is a pedagogical text: clear sequences of steps, attentive photographs (or visual descriptions), and practical troubleshooting for the awkward moments every novice has with a rotating lump of clay.