17.3.24

When Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis

[...] Robinson should be an ideal reader of Genesis, of its richly compacted human stories and their sharp details: Noah, drunk and naked in his tent, his state witnessed by his son Ham, although not by his two other sons, who walk into his tent backward to avoid the filial shame; or Jacob, tricking his elder brother, Esau, out of his birthright and winning his father’s blessing (“Do you have only one blessing, my father?” Esau cries on discovering what’s happened. “Bless me, too, my father!”); or the long story of Joseph and his envious brothers ... James Wood, The New Yorker

il nuovo libro di Marilynne Robinson si intitola Reading Genesis ed è uscito da Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

10.3.24

The Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages

Engineered languages such as the one Chalamet speaks [in Dune, n.d.r] represent a new benchmark in imaginative fiction. Twenty years ago, viewers would have struggled to name franchises other than “Star Trek” or “The Lord of the Rings” that bothered to invent new languages. Today, with the budgets of the biggest films and series rivalling the G.D.P.s of small island nations, constructed languages, or conlangs, are becoming a norm, if not an implicit requirement. Breeze through entertainment from the past decade or so, and you’ll find lingos designed for Paleolithic peoples (“Alpha”), spell-casting witches (“Penny Dreadful”), post-apocalyptic survivors (“Into the Badlands”), Superman’s home planet of Krypton (“Man of Steel”), a cross-species alien alliance (“Halo”), time-travelling preteens (“Paper Girls”), the Munja’kin tribe of Oz (“Emerald City”), and Santa Claus and his elves (“The Christmas Chronicles” and its sequel).

3.3.24

A Country Shaped By Poetry

In Somaliland, poems were often recited to pass the time by men leading camel trains and by women weaving mats to cover their domed huts. Like the lives of the nomadic people who spoke them, the poems were cyclical. When their speakers moved, they brought their animals and their poetry. At each stop along this annual migration, the women would reuse the verses as they built their thatched homes and the men would recite them as they moved their herds to water.

But poems also served a utilitarian, public purpose: they could be deployed to argue a court case or to make peace between warring families. And their lines were powerful in ways few other nations could understand. In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and offered paths to peace. Nina Strochlic, Noema

25.2.24

Reading is so sexy

They have killed skinny jeans and continue to shame millennials for having side partings in their hair. They think using the crying tears emoji to express laughter is embarrassing. But now comes a surprising gen Z plot twist. One habit that those born between 1997 and 2012 are keen to endorse is reading – and it’s physical books rather than digital that they are thumbing. Chloe Mac Donnell, The Guardian

18.2.24

Five of the best books about gossip

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

The play’s title is a triple entendre: in Elizabethan England, “nothing” was slang for “vagina”, and was pronounced as “no-ting”, suggesting “noticing” – a nod to the gossip and eavesdropping that carve the plot. A conversation about Beatrice’s “love” for Benedick is staged for Benedick to overhear, and vice versa, which leads to the pair getting together. Later, Borachio is overheard bragging about tricking Claudio by pretending to woo his love interest, Hero, and is arrested.

questo è uno dei cinque libri sui pettegolezzi consigliati da Ella Creamer, The Guardian

11.2.24

A Brief History of the United States’ Accents and Dialects

The United States may lack an official language, but a road trip across the country reveals dozens of different accents and dialects of English that serve as living links to Americans’ ancestors.

What’s the difference between these two linguistic terms? Accents center on the pronunciation of words, while dialects encompass pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. They both often vary by region. Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, Smithsonian

(Nella foto: New Orleans)

4.2.24

The new generation of novelists writing about motherhood

Recent novels of motherhood explore work and identity, creation and loss, love, ambivalence, even regret. They are political without being didactic, furious and funny. If they could be said to have one thing in common, it is their corporeality. They are all unflinchingly of the body. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, The Guardian

28.1.24

Exclamation Point!

If you’re a woman who works in a traditionally male-dominated industry, chances are high that you’ve heard some version of this advice: when you finish writing your email, go through and replace all the exclamation points with periods.

This well-intentioned advice is based on three regressive ideas [...] Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study

21.1.24

The CIA’s Creative Writing Group

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.

I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.

She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.

I asked what level the writers in the group were.

She said the group had writers of all levels.

I asked what the speaking fee was.

She said that as far as she knew, there was no speaking fee.

I dwelled a little on this point.

She confirmed that there was no speaking fee.

When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee. But I was told that, in lieu of payment, the writing group would take me out to lunch in the executive dining room afterward. I would also have my picture taken in front of the CIA seal, and I could post that picture anywhere I wanted. Johannes Lichtman, The Paris Review

molto divertente!

14.1.24

Università americane in declino?

How did Harvard Medical School become ensnared in the underground market in human body parts? Brenna Ehrlich, RollingStone

Why, in the last 10 years, have elite colleges in particular become sites of such relentless ideological confrontation? Len Gutkin, The Chronicle of Higher Education

The rise of the extremely productive researcher: Some researchers publish a new paper every five days, on average. Data trackers suspect not all their manuscripts were produced through honest labour. Gemma Conroy, nature