This Monday’s Link Roundup has its usual collection of eclectic gems. One of my favorites is The QWERTY Effect: How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words. I’m wondering if this effect only applies to touch typists. What about those of us who peck away with a couple of fingers? 
Another story I love because it’s absolutely serendipitous is MacDonald clan photos found by great-great grandson in antique shop.
- This Is My Home: Inside Anthony’s Parlor of Curiosities. [Video]“…a friend and I were strolling down a street in the East Village when we stumbled upon a whimsical place — a kind of curiosities parlor that stretched, narrow and full of unusual objects and private memories, from the street site of the building to the backyard. Inside it was Anthony Pisano … We, it turns out, we not the only ones mesmerized by Anthony’s curiosities and unusual lens on the world. This Is My Home by filmmakers Kelsey Holtaway and Mark Cersosimo is a beautiful short film, in the vein of This Must Be The Place, that captures Anthony’s singular character through the contents of his home and his heart.”
- Tiny Libraries, DIY Reading Rooms, and Other Micro Book Depots. “We wanted to venture into DIY territory and visit some of the tiniest — but gutsiest — libraries around the world. These are unusual places where lit lovers ventured to create a mini community athenaeum, and guerrilla librarians have set up camp in the face of budget cuts and closing institutions. Each micro library’s aim is different, but whether they’re promoting independent/alternative presses, or simply trying to encourage reading, these plucky, little libraries deserve your attention.”
- Parting Words. “When Brenda Wineapple closed her laptop on “Sister Brother,” her dual biography of the siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein, she cried. Stacy Schiff, having written the final words of “Cleopatra,” was still worried. “I lived a little bit in fear of her,” she explains. When Doris Kearns Goodwin finished “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” she built more shelves in her library annex (once the family garage) to hold all the books she had acquired. Each of these distinguished, prizewinning, best-selling biographers was saying goodbye to a subject with whom she had been living for a long time. For authors of biographies, this intimacy is normal, almost inevitable.”
- MacDonald clan photos found by great-great grandson in antique shop. ““If you are an antique collector and somebody asks would you like to look in the back, you jump at it, because it is where the treasures are hiding.” Alas, the backroom was more disappointing than the front. That is, until Mr. MacDonald spotted a stack of black and white photographs in Edwardian and Victorian frames. He was intrigued. And then astonished. The faces staring up at him belonged to his long dead relatives, an influential Halifax clan of MacDonalds bound by marriage, friendship and political alliance to Sir Charles Tupper.
- Finding Your Book Interrupted … By the Tablet You Read It On. “Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons? People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.”
- The QWERTY Effect: How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words. “A keyboard’s arrangement could have a small but significant impact on how we perceive the meaning of words we type. Specifically, the QWERTY keyboard may gradually attach more positive meanings to words with more letters located on the right side of the layout (everything to the right of T, G and B).”
- The 10 Best Movies Adapted from Memoirs. “Though hundreds of movies made each year are adapted from novels and short stories, relatively few are built from memoir — despite the fact that the form has been at least as popular as novels in the last two decades, and may be more beloved by the general public…we got to thinking about the few really great films adapted from memoirs. Click through to see our picks, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites.”
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