Parents completed a questionnaire to assess preschoolers’ hyperactivity level as a potential confounding variable. In all three experiments, children were randomly assigned to watch a video with either frequent or infrequent fantastical events their EF was immediately assessed after viewing, using behavioral measures of working memory, sustained attention, and cognitive flexibility. Three experiments were conducted to test whether watching an animated show with frequent fantastical events decreased Chinese preschoolers’ post-viewing executive function (EF), and to test possible mechanisms of this effect. 3School of Psychology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China.2Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Research, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, United States.1Department of Preschool Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China.To amend this, listen to Polo’s observation, “it is not the voice that commands the story it is the ear.Hui Li 1*, Yeh Hsueh 2*, Haoxue Yu 1 and Katherine M. Within the cohesive empire, the utopian ideal of the cities remains unachieved - whether aimed through the ontological set-up of Plato’s Ideal City in The Republic, or down the centuries, when Calvino sat to write about the cities, which could not be validated.

Khan’s aspiration to systematically bracket Polo’s accounts echoes the political realities. At every step, Polo defeats the purpose of the frames and questions its boundaries that refrain him from putting the blocks together. To have a better understanding of Polo’s narration, Khan deploys - chessboard and atlas - as the predetermined tools to lend a structure to Polo’s commentary. Inevitably, it barred me from reading the book under the lens of political empire and sovereign logics. Under the current context, while rereading the text, I was taken by surprise that in the past, I had been caught within the poetic-philosophy framework of the cities. Largely, the text’s liminal position between modern and postmodern forms catches the attention of the readers and critic alike.

Even the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge has dedicated a long poem Kubla Khan to the ‘slight disposition’ of the emperor of the Tartars who ruled as far as the regions of current day EuroAsia.Įarly sailing ship for voyages of discovery Image Credit: Courtesy of Creative Commons Even if the cities documented in the book are as fantastical as the Be'er Sheva, the travel accounts of the real-time Italian explorer Marco Polo and Kublai Khan’s court were made popular in the 13th century Italian Renaissance with a travelogue The Travels of Marco Polo written down by Rustichello da Pisa and Polo. The second part holds true for this book - with less than 150 pages it would force you to take long pauses before turning a page and often even moving to the next paragraph to understand the meaning of the unsaid ‘between the lines’. If the cover of the book does not affirm the quality of the book, then the number of pages is nowhere the yardstick to measure the intensity of the read. My first encounter of the bond between these two countries came with the two protagonists - Venetian traveller Marco Polo and the Tartars emperor Kublai Khan - of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, published in 1972. Book cover of Invisible Cities Image Credit: Courtesy of the author

Fantastical sandwich drawing