BUONE VACANZE!

Vado in vacanza. Riprenderò a pubblicare i miei post su novità varie nel mondo dei libri in USA, e nel mondo anglofono in generale, all'inizio di settembre.

Buone vacanze a tutti!

Nuovi libri sulla matematica

Nuovi libri sulla matematica di Jordan Ellenberg, David J. Hand, Michael Blastland e David Spiegelhalter, Amir Alexander, e Alex Bellos. "Every math teacher cringes at the inevitable question from students: “When am I ever going to use this?” Ellenberg, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin, admits that even though we’ll never need to compute long lists of integrals in our daily lives, we still need math. It’s “a science of not being wrong about things,” he writes, and it gives us tools to enhance our reasoning, which is prone to false assumptions and cognitive biases". nytbooks.

Avoid the Ivy League

William Deresiewicz consiglia di evitare le Ivy League e sull'argomento ha scritto un libro che uscirà ad agosto, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press). "I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history". newrepublic.

Il piacere della risata

Una bella risata, c'è poco di più piacevole. Eppure la risata pare sia ancora un mistero. Ne parla Mary Beard, prof. di Classics all'University of Cambridge e autrice del libro Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (University of California Press). "The pleasure and excitement of studying laughter, for a historian, is that it generates many more questions than answers. Theories of laughter have always been "theories of theories," a way of talking about laughter and "something else." Recent neurological advances in understanding which bits of the brain generate laughter (and how) are, of course, important, and not to be dismissed by decidedly nonexperimental historians.
But in historical terms, culture almost always trumps nature. Laughter has been a key marker of what we feel about other cultures, about our own past and our views of the "progress of civilization." chronicle.