The Friday Four, Part 58

~1~

I stumbled across this textual analysis comparing several Young Adult fantasy series: The Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter, and Divergent.  Veeeeery interesting!  The author compares most common sentences, most distinctive descriptive words across the four series and it's fascinating to see how much of the feel of the books comes across just through those two factors.

~2~

Photo courtesy Raymond Bryson

I love questions and questioning on just about every topic.  Answers rarely drop into our laps when we're not looking for them and exhibiting at least some curiosity about the world.  But are we encouraging our kids to keep asking questions or are we inadvertently stifling that natural curiosity because it's more convenient for us, both as individuals and as a society, when they don't ask questions? I know that sometimes my children's unending stream of questions can get on my last nerve, but I never want them to feel they can't ask me anything, and I think that message has gotten through to them.

In general, as kids grow, they start questioning less and less.  And I think that's a bad trend. As this article states, we need to find ways to make questioning both "safe" and "cool."  And speaking of the importance of questioning and curiosity...

~3~

Marianne North. Mary Kingsley. Alexandra David-Neel.

Ever heard of them?  Me, neither.  Until watching this four-minute video on upworthy.

With the "power of curiosity," these women accomplished incredible things, traveling all over the globe, during a time when most women never left the area where they were born.  "The harder the journey, the better the story..."

~4~

This amazing slideshow was up on the yahoo homepage on International Women's Day and I just loved flipping through the portraits of mothers and daughters together around the world from Mogadishu to Mumbai and Tokyo to Tepito. The mothers' hopes and dreams for their daughters are beautiful and more than anything else convinced me that we have far more in common than we do different.