Cheering news for lit snobs via the NYT. Empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence get a boost from reading–certain reading:
[A] series of five experiments conducted by social psychologists at The New School for Social Research in New York City, people who read excerpts from literary fiction (Don DeLillo, Alice Munro, Wendell Berry) scored better than people who read popular fiction (Gillian Flynn, Rosamunde Pilcher, Mary Roberts Rinehart) on tests asking them to infer what people were thinking or feeling–a field that scientists call “Theory of Mind.”