LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

I thought of Nellie Bly (1864–1922) after reading an article on the benefits of listening to music in The Huffington Post (December 14, 2025). Having read Oliver Sacks ’s Musicophilia , Lindsay Holmes has little new to add in “7 Undeniable Benefits of Listening to Music.” What struck me instead was a now-widespread mode of reporting, far removed from the methods of Bly, one of the first investigative journalists of modern times. Holmes supports her claims with formulas such as “science shows…,” “research suggests…,” “a 2014 study found…,” and “according to experts…” "experts believe that..." Lacking confirmed sources or verifiable citations, the argument—benign though it may be—floats free of accountability. Holmes herself is hardly to blame. Her schooling shares the responsibility, as does The Huffington Post, for allowing such loose, quasi-scientific prose to pass as journalism. Nellie Bly, I suspect, would not have approved.

Sauntering about town, watching traffic jams, skirting bicycles and skateboarders on sidewalks, I often catch myself humming. Waiting for a traffic light to change, fellow pedestrians pull their eyes away from their cell phone screens and stare at me as a weirdo. Someone humming a tune in public is suspect nowadays. But I digress. The lowdown about this humming business is that the tunes that come to my mind while strolling are usually jingles and bits of children’s songs that my grandfather and my mother sang to me at the onset of my life. Often, I cannot recall from whom, or even when, I heard those songs that clutter my mind, but they are there, ready to pop up and bring a smile to my otherwise sullen face. Oliver Sacks refers to this phenomenon as “Musical hallucinations” in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Now I know the great benefits of putting music and words together. Children’s songs have catchy music to them, and simple, sometimes nonsensical, lyrics...