Auguri!

 “I dedicate this book to the many children who had no chance to grow up because of stupid wars and cruel persecutions which devastated cities and destroyed innocent families. I hope that when the readers of these stories become men and women they will love not only their own children but all good children everywhere.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, Zlateh la capra, con le illustrazioni di Maurice Sendak.

Un libro magico e meraviglioso. Con queste belle parole auguro a tutti un Buon Natale e un Felice Anno Nuovo. Al 2022!

I love you, I love you, I love you

For such a simple sentence, three monosyllables arranged in the lock-step syntax of subject, verb and object, “I love you” can fall on the ears of its chosen recipient in unpredictable ways. These words capture both our need for love and our reliance on language, and our often fraught attempts to marry these two things up. Joe Moran, The Guardian (2016)

e un ricordo di Christopher Hitchens, morto dieci anni fa:

Christopher’s output, in columns, essays and books, was voluminous. He was one of very few foreign journalists to transplant to the United States and make an impact within the Beltway. He also had many detractors and enemies, notably but far from exclusively, among his former comrades on the radical left.  Oliver Kamm, Prospect

Case

From Charlotte Brontë’s Norton Conyers to Alan Hollinghurst’s Canford Court – the little known locations that inspired the most famous homes in literature. Phyllis Richardson, House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life (Unboun, 2017). Phyllis Richardson, The Guardian 

e un lungo articolo sulla traduzione, che in realtà mi ha attratto per la descrizione iniziale di una casa londinese: 

A couple of years ago we rented a beautiful apartment in London, a large flat where we must have stayed four or five times. It was perfectly comfortable and perfectly private, and the location, directly behind the British Museum, was ideal for visits to theaters and museums. It was decorated in the taste of a refined gay man of my parents’ generation. It had good Chinese porcelain, carefully chosen oriental rugs, witty French prints. It also contained the kind of photographs which, in that mysterious way, have grown dated without becoming quite old — gently pushed, by an accumulation of tiny changes, into the past. Some minute evolution in eyewear, some invisible reformulation of lipstick, some arcane improvement in cameras, betrayed their age. They did not look ancient. But though I couldn’t say exactly why, I knew that the pretty young bride was now middle-aged, and that a lot of the jolly middle-aged folks at Angkor Wat were now dead. 

I also knew, as soon as I walked inside, that the house belonged to an American. Benjamin Moser, Liberties

 

 

Why Does Coffee Make Me Poop?

Coffee is a complex beverage containing more than 1,000 chemical compounds, many of which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. And determining how they affect the intestines is challenging. Alice Callahan, NYT

una domanda molto più inquietante:

Why do dead Jews play such a large role in the world’s imagination, and how does that distortion still affect us today? In her Tablet Studios podcast, Adventures with Dead Jews, author and host Dara Horn takes you on a ride through some of the most bizarre, disturbing, wondrous, tragic, and accidentally hilarious moments of Jewish history, and dives deep into their repercussions in the present.

infine una domanda bizzarra:

Is Superman Circumcised?, a study of the superhero’s Jewish influences, has resoundingly won the competition to be named “oddest book title of the year”. Alison Flood, The Guardian

Stanno uscendo gli elenchi dei migliori libri del 2021, qui i migliori di cucina:

The best food books of 2021, The Guardian

 

 

Robot

But an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death will be showcasing the work of a rather more modern devotee: Ai-Da the robot, which will make history by becoming the first robot to publicly perform poetry written by its AI algorithms.

The ultra-realistic Ai-Da, who was devised in Oxford by Aidan Meller and named after computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, was given the whole of Dante’s epic three-part narrative poem, the Divine Comedy, to read, in JG Nichols’ English translation. She then used her algorithms, drawing on her data bank of words and speech pattern analysis, to produce her own reactive work to Dante’s. Alison Flood, The Guardian

e anche la lunga storia della fascinazione degli umani per le macchine intelligenti:

Robots have histories that extend far back into the past. Artificial servants, autonomous killing machines, surveillance systems, and sex robots all find expression from the human imagination in works and contexts beyond Ovid (43 BCE to 17 CE) and the story of Pygmalion in cultures across Eurasia and North Africa. This long history of our human-machine relationships also reminds us that our aspirations, fears, and fantasies about emergent technologies are not new, even as the circumstances in which they appear differ widely. Situating these objects, and the desires that create them, within deeper and broader contexts of time and space reveals continuities and divergences that, in turn, provide opportunities to critique and question contemporary ideas and desires about robots and artificial intelligence (AI). E.R. Truitt, The MIT Press

Books Do Furnish a Civilization

IN THEIR NEW BOOK, The Library: A Fragile History, a splendid study of the institution of the library from its origins until today, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen recount the initiation, the innovations, and the dissolution of library after library, personal as well as public, scholarly as well as lending, over the centuries. The word “fragile” in their subtitle touches on the unsettled conditions of libraries throughout history. For books have everywhere and at all times been lost, stolen, vandalized, spoiled by neglect, while entire libraries have been abandoned, systematically despoiled, set afire, even deliberately bombed. Joseph Epstein, Commentary

interessanti riflessioni sulle biblioteche, e anche sui classici, con qualche sorprendente scoperta, e altre considerazioni più à la page:

Historically, in America, the true strength of the Classics and of a Classical education has not been among the elite but among the rising middle class. Naomi Kanakia, LA Review of Books

 

University of Austin, una nuova università

Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals. Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker disinvitations, but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship. [...] That is why this week I am one of a group of people announcing the founding of a new university — indeed, a new kind of university: the University of Austin. [...] Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S. Niall Ferguson, WP

Nel suo lungo e appassionato articolo Niall Ferguson spiega il programma di questa nuova università, un progetto che sembra molto interessante. Auguri!

Tatum O’Neal

Amazing as Tatum is in this performance, and iconic and penetrating as the film may be, the blockbuster slips into the same old car chase, between the same old cops and robbers. It’s all about stuntmen doing the fancy driving. And yet, Paper Moon has the face, neck, shoulders, hair, subtle morphing expressions, and very punchy attitude of Tatum O’Neal—and it has therefore held up beautifully. Later in life, Tatum would appear for a few seconds now and then on camera between points up in the stands watching her husband, John McEnroe, play tennis at Wimbledon, and she would leave the same sort of indelible impression—by virtue of her gaze and the mystery of her concentration. Jeremy Sigler, Tablet

Adorabile! L'articolo parla, però, soprattutto di Polly Platt, art director del film di Bogdanovich e anche sua ex moglie.

Inoltre:

Is Superman Circumcised? favourite to win Oddest book title of the year, Alison Flood, The Guardian

Why Cemeteries Matter

As Americans increasingly opt out of burial, cemeteries very well may become obsolete. It’s worth asking, then, especially at a time of year when graveyards loom large in our cultural imagination, what purpose do they serve? Aside from the practical need to dispose of corpses in a sanitary way, do they serve any higher good for the community? Rachel K. Alexander, Tablet

Amo molto passeggiare per i cimiteri, soprattutto quelli americani, o quelli monumentali. L'idea che stiano scomparendo mi turba molto.

Scompaiono anche le città? 

Can you hear the death rattle of the skyscraper? It’s the sound of the free candyfloss cart being wheeled past the rows of empty desks, and the lonely drip of the beer-keg tap by the water cooler. In a desperate attempt to lure employees back to their offices, companies are laying on all manner of novelty treats, from monogrammed water bottles to personalised notebooks. It is hoped that these perks might convince people to leave the house, get on packed trains and jostle for the lifts, all in the name of teamwork and productivity. Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian

The Chastity Plot

Austen’s novel [Pride and Prejudice] is a brilliantly ironic take on what Lisabeth During calls “the chastity plot.” The course of true love never does run smooth, at any rate not in the English social novel of the nineteenth century, in which misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and plain missteps ensure that it doesn’t all end too soon—that there is, in fact, a plot. For your longed-for love match to get fouled up by someone else’s indiscretion (with a third party) seems particularly harsh. It is, however, the inevitable consequence of a system in which women’s sexual virtue acts as a guarantee of the legitimacy of social reproduction. Clair Wills reviews, Lisabeth During, The Chastity Plot (University of Chicago Press). nybooks.

Can music give you an orgasm? The short answer is yes. A longer answer will unlock the secrets of the evolution of music. But let’s begin with orgasms. Sam Dresser, Aeon

Interessante, no?

Smells

If all our genius lies in our nostrils, as Nietzsche remarked, the nose is an untrained genius, brilliant but erratic. The human nose can detect a dizzying array of smells, with a theoretical upper limit of one trillion smells—yet many of us are incapable of describing these smells in words more precise than smelly and fragrant. Jude Stewart, The Believer

Un bell'articolo sugli odori, un altro su come si legge un libro (sono sempre stata incuriosita da come si legge!). 

The 20-page rule: Novelist Mark Billingham advises readers to angrily launch a book across the room after 20 non-gripping pages – but almost 40% of people will keep going right to the end, The Guardian

infine Hannah Arendt, sempre affascinante:

As her friend Mary McCarthy once said, Arendt was “a magnificent stage diva”.  Christopher Bray, The Critic

Dogopolis

Dog mess once had medicinal uses. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physicians used it as an astringent in the form of album Graecum (dried and whitened canine excrement).

It was hard for some observers to discuss the canine excrement that was now visible within the modern cityscape. In a letter to the Times of London, Bristol-based Dr. G. Knowles acknowledged the difficulty of discussing the foul matter: “I can only think that people have been comparatively silent regarding this disgusting nuisance out of a sense of delicacy.” Excerpt reprinted from Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris by Chris Pearson, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. Lapham's Quarterly

Oltre alla cacca dei cani, questa settimana segnaliamo anche il cambiamento che sta avvenendo nelle autobiografie: 

Rather than prioritizing confession and catharsis, today’s authors are focusing on the question of who gets to share their version of things and interrogating the form, along with themselves.  Megan O’Grady, NYT

Performative

We have more than enough language policing these days, even though it is now devoted more to varieties of social and political correctness than to matters of grammar, diction, or usage. The most assiduous guardians of the latter considerations—including William Safire (of the famous “On Language” column in the New York Times) and Richard Mitchell (a.k.a. “The Underground Grammarian”)—have long gone the way of all flesh. But there are times when one sees senseless violence being done to a word, and one must speak up. The inner Edwin Newman (to invoke another member of that quixotic Old Guard) can be denied for only so long.

I’ve come to that point with the word performative, which has managed to insinuate itself in record time into the discourse of academics and journalists, seemingly overnight becoming an infestation as annoying as body lice and as worthless as a pile of wooden nickels. Wilfred M. McClay, The Hedgehog Review

e sempre su The Hedgehog Review, Richard Hughes Gibson: 

The historian Joe Moran begins his 2018 style guide, First You Write a Sentence, by outlining a comic routine unfortunately familiar to many of us:

First I write a sentence. I get a tickle of an idea for how the words might come together, like an angler feeling a tug on the rod’s line. Then I sound out the sentence in my head. Then I tap it on my keyboard, trying to recall its shape. Then I look at it and say it aloud, to see if it sings. Then I tweak, rejig, shave off a syllable, swap a word for a phrase or phrase for a word. Then I sit it next to other sentences to see how it behaves in company. And then I delete it all and start again. 

Ebooks Are an Abomination

Personalmente, ho adottato senza problemi, anzi con piacere, il kindle. Di seguito un interessante articolo sul perché c'è chi lo ama e chi o odia, e come questo ha a che fare con quel che significa per noi leggere.

Whether you love or hate ebooks is probably a function of what books mean to you, and why. [...] But what it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down. Ian Bogost, The Atlantic

Trovare le parole giuste: From adoption to sexuality, early pregnancy to death, a palliative care doctor explores the discussions we often try to avoid. Joanna Cannon, Guardian

What's Wrong With Sex Between Professors and Students?

Un articolo molto interessante sul problema annunciato dal titolo. 

Teachers, as teachers, understand how to do certain things; students, as students, want to understand how to do those things. The tacit promise of the classroom is that the teacher will work to confer on the student some of his knowledge and understanding. In the best case, the teacher-student relationship arouses in the student a strong desire, a sense of thrilled if inchoate infatuation. That desire is the lifeblood of the classroom, and it is the teacher’s duty to nurture and direct it toward its proper object: learning. The teacher who allows his student’s desire to settle on him as an object, or the teacher who actively makes himself the object of her desire, has failed in his role as a teacher. Amia Srinivasan, NYT

 Amia Srinivasan elabora ulteriormente questo concetto base e spiega perché ha deliberatamente usato il rapporto tra professore maschio e studentessa, da leggere!

the 50 biggest books of autumn 2021

From new novels by Sally Rooney and Colson Whitehead to Michel Barnier’s take on Brexit, Bernardine Evaristo’s manifesto and diaries from David Sedaris – all the releases to look out for. Justine Jordan and Katy Guest, The Guardian

e anche: perché sempre più autori pubblicano su Substack:

 The subscription newsletter platform Substack announced on Wednesday it had signed an exclusive deal with Salman Rushdie – but he is just the latest in a growing number of authors making the leap to write serialised fiction delivered straight to the inboxes of subscribers who pay a monthly fee. [...] For Rushdie, the Substack deal is about finding “a slightly more complex connection” with readers, and to give him the space to talk about things that “are just too big to discuss in tweets … I think that new technology always makes possible new art forms, and I think literature has not found its new form in this digital age,” he told the Guardian earlier this week. “I’m just diving in here and que sera sera, you know. It will either turn out to be something wonderful and enjoyable, or it won’t.” David Barnett, The Guardian

Fran Lebowitz

One of the leitmotifs in Martin Scosese’s second and most recent documentary about her, Pretend It’s a City, are the shots of a solitary Lebowitz strolling around New York in her distinctive uniform of a long overcoat, Levi’s 501s and loafers, observing everything and detached from it all. So doesn’t she resent that her aversion to technology now makes her so dependent on others? “No, I just think, isn’t it lucky I have friends who have these things and can do them for me?” she says, with the smile of one who has arranged her life exactly as she wants it to be. Hadley Freeman, The Guardian

e anche:

David Grossman’s follow-up to the International Booker-winning A Horse Walks Into a Bar is a Russian doll of a novel, a book of secrets wrapped within secrets. It’s told by Gili, a film-maker, a damaged young woman who has already tried to end her life once. In a narrative that is teasingly digressive, threading back and forward between different time periods, between first- and third-person voices, we slowly learn the tragic story of Gili and her family, the way the brutal legacy of the 20th-century’s violence has written itself into the lives of these decent, wounded people. Alex Preston, The Guardian

 

Octavian Report: Why should we read the Odyssey?

Daniel Mendelsohn: There's a reason the classics are classics — and it's not because they have better agents than books that aren't classics. The classics are classics because they pose in a way that is lively and narratively interesting and challenging the most basic questions about human experience. The Greek and Roman classics are the foundation for our way of seeing the world. And therefore we read them because they tell us something true about life. In the case of the Odyssey, aside from everything else it is, it's one of the great family dramas. It's about homecoming, it's about the meaning of home, it's about how you know and how you prove your intimacy with members of your family. It's about the bonds that connect family members over many years despite time and distance. 

Dalla bellissima intervista a Daniel Mendelsohn sul perché leggere i classici, substack

 Inoltre ...

The word ‘hoax’ did not catch on till the early 19th century. Before that one spoke of a hum, a frump, a prat or a bilk. But 18th-century Britain, even if not rife with talk of ‘hoaxes’, was full of incautious souls at risk of being bilked. Ian Keable, The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth-Century England (Westbourne Press). Henry Hitchings, The Spectator

The Sex Lives of African Women

The Sex Lives of African Women, is an anthology of confessional accounts from across the African continent and the diaspora. The stories are sorted into three sections: self-discovery, freedom and healing. Each “sex life” is told in the subject’s own words. The result is a book that takes the reader into the beds of polygamous marriages in Senegal, to furtive lesbian hookups in toilets in Cairo and polyamorous clubs in the United States, but without any sensationalism or essentialism. Nesrine Malik, The Guardian

In “The Joy of Sweat,” (Norton) an entertaining and illuminating guide to the necessity and virtues of perspiration, the science journalist Sarah Everts points out that plenty of people pay good money to exude sweat while also paying good money to hide it. Jennifer Szalai, NYT

E con questi curiosi titoli vi auguro una buona estate. Ritornerò alla fine di agosto, inizio di settembre. 

Lab Leaks

What happens when an academic idea escapes into the wild? "The idea of a lab leak has gone, well, viral. As a political scientist, I cannot assess whether the evidence shows that COVID-19 emerged naturally or from laboratory procedures (although many experts strenuously disagree). Yet as a political scientist, I do think that my discipline can learn something from thinking seriously about our own “lab leaks” and the damage they could cause". Paul Musgrave, FP

Un lungo articolo sulle newsletters, un nuovo genere che pare sia in crescita. "The newsletter is the ultimate form for a moment in which writers feel pressure to produce a steady stream of advertisements for themselves". Molly Fischer, The Cut

Highly Irregular

Il titolo si riferisce a un divertente libro sulle stranezze della lingua inglese, Highly Irregular, di Arika Okrent (Oxford University Press). "Ms. Okrent investigates more or less familiar questions: Is the letter “y” a vowel or a consonant? What does it mean to say that the exception “proves” the rule? Why does English have so many synonyms? She also ponders whether “I am woe” would be better than “woe is me”; what egging someone on has to do with eggs; and why we don’t tell a restaurant server, “I’m a large spender. Make it a big pizza.” Henry Hitchings, WSJ

 

Project Cassandra: Three years ago, a small group of academics at a German university launched an unprecedented collaboration with the military – using novels to try to pinpoint the world’s next conflicts. [...]

The name of the initiative was Project Cassandra: for the next two years, university researchers would use their expertise to help the German defence ministry predict the future.

The academics weren’t AI specialists, or scientists, or political analysts. Instead, the people the colonels had sought out in a stuffy top-floor room were a small team of literary scholars led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature with wild curls and a penchant for black roll-necks. Philip Oltermann, The Guardian

Sandro Veronesi, lavorare a Venezia e la storia dell'asterisco

Recensione entusiastica di The Hummingbird (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, tradotto da Elena Pala) del nostro Sandro Veronesi, "Everything that makes the novel worthwhile and engaging is here: warmth, wit, intelligence, love, death, high seriousness, low comedy, philosophy, subtle personal relationships and the complex interior life of human beings". Edward Docx, The Guardian

Sconfortante analisi del mercato del lavoro a Venezia, "Among the lousy job options for Venetians: serving pizza, selling fake local “artifacts,” and working at the Venice Biennal", Giulio Piovesan, Hyperallergic

Molto interessante questa recente storia dell'asterisco (Claire Cock-Starkey, Hyphens & Hashtags*: *The Stories Behind the Symbols on Our Keyboard, Bodleian Library Publishing), che lo fa risalire ad Aristarco di Samotracia, "Sumerian pictographic writing includes a sign for “star” that looks like a modern asterisk. These early writings from five thousand years ago are the first known depiction of an asterisk; however, it seems unlikely that these pictograms are the forerunner of the symbol we use today. Palaeographers know that Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 bc) used an asterisk symbol when editing Homer in the second century bc, because later scholars wrote about him doing so. Physical examples of Aristarchus’ asterisks have not survived, so we cannot know their physical shape, but as the word asterisk derives from the Greek asteriskos, meaning “little star,” an assumption has been made that they resembled a small star. Aristarchus used the symbols to mark places in Homer’s text that he was copying where he thought passages were from another source".  Claire Cock-Starkey, Lapham's

Biblioteche

From the British Library to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, a consortium of libraries and museums have come together in an “unprecedented” effort to raise £15m and save an “astonishingly important” set of literary manuscripts for the nation.

The plans were formed after the announcement last month that the “lost” Honresfield library was to be put up for auction at Sotheby’s this summer. Almost entirely inaccessible since 1939, the library was put together by Victorian industrialists William and Alfred Law at the turn of the 20th century, and is a literary treasure trove that had experts dancing with excitement – and warning that action needed to be taken to prevent it being sold piecemeal to private collectors. Alison Flood, The Guardian

Il controverso caso di Amy Chua, la Tiger Mother, docente di legge a Yale e ora accusata di party scatenati durante il Covid. "The question has arisen, in online comments sections and on Twitter, why anyone is even talking about Amy Chua. Who cares about a parenting memoirist’s removal from a law-school teaching roster? The answer is, in part, because this story manages to touch on seemingly every single cultural flashpoint of the past few years. Chua’s critics see a story about #MeToo—because of her husband, but also because Chua supported the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, even after he was accused of sexual assault. Meanwhile, Chua’s defenders see a morality tale about liberal cancel culture. “What they’ve done to you is SOP”—standard operating procedure—“for conservative allies but chills me to the bone nonetheless,” a supporter tweeted at her, earlier this month. Megyn Kelly weighed in, tweeting, “Make no mistake: this is retribution for her support of Brett Kavanaugh, & it is disgusting.” Chua’s allies have also suggested that anti-Asian bias is involved. “The woke academy reserves a special vitriol for minority faculty who don’t toe the line politically,” Niall Ferguson, a historian, tweeted". Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker

Omero e Nerone sul New Yorker

Il nuovo numero del New Yorker si occupa di Nerone, che forse non era poi così terribile, "Nero, who was enthroned in Rome in 54 A.D., at the age of sixteen, and went on to rule for nearly a decade and a half, developed a reputation for tyranny, murderous cruelty, and decadence that has survived for nearly two thousand years.[...] All of this, according to some recent scholars, is at best an exaggeration and at worst a fabrication: a narrative derived from biased histories, written decades after Nero died, that relied on dubious sources". Rebecca Mead, New Yorker

E si occupa di Omero, che forse non è mai esistito, "We may not know when Homer was born, but we can say for certain that he ceased to exist in the early nineteen-thirties, when a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, with the seemingly innocuous title “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making.” Parry’s thesis was simple but momentous: “It is my own view, as those who have read my studies on Homeric style know, that the nature of Homeric poetry can be grasped only when one has seen that it is composed in a diction which is oral, and so formulaic, and so traditional.” In other words, the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all". Adam Kirsch, New Yorker

E ancora: What happened to Jan Kerouac, Jack’s forgotten daughter, David Barnett, The Guardian

 

New York’s Hyphenated History

In Pardis Mahdavi’s new book Hyphen, she explores the way hyphenation became not only a copyediting quirk but a complex issue of identity, assimilation, and xenophobia amid anti-immigration movements at the turn of the twentieth century. In the excerpt below, Mahdavi gives the little-known history of New York’s hyphenation debate.

“This thing—this hyphen—is like a gremlin which sneaks around in the dark … you should call a special meeting of City Council immediately and have a surgical operation on it! We won’t be hyphenated by anyone!” Pardis Mahdavi, The Paris Review

Sempre molto interessanti le discussioni sulla punteggiatura! 

Anche questa settimana: Blades, poisons, guns, bombs, defenestration, and plump cushions: Et Tu, Brute? Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder, Michael Burleigh (Picador), Jonathan Meades, Literary Review

Ancora sulla cancel culture: "Publishers today are teetering on a tightrope. Which voices should they amplify with a publishing deal – those their staff agree with, or those with an audience who agree with them? How far does an author have to go before their views are deemed unpublishable? What about when the personal views of an author, say JK Rowling, are condemned and staff object to working on her next children’s book? Where to draw the line?" Alison Flood, The Guardian

Branching out

Trees communicate with each other, store memories and respond to attacks. They have a profoundly positive effect on our emotions … but can we know how they feel about us? Peter Wohlleben, The Guardian. Un articolo molto interessante per chi è amante delle piante e che, come me, pensa o si illude di provare empatia per esse.

Dizionari: Victorian attempts to veil the meanings of crude ancient Greek words are set to be brushed away by a new dictionary 23 years in the making. It is the first to take a fresh look at the language in almost 200 years and promises to “spare no blushes” for today’s classics students. The completed Cambridge Greek Lexicon, which is being published by Cambridge University Press, runs to two volumes and features around 37,000 Greek words, drawn from 90 authors and set out across 1,500 pages. Alison Flood, The Guardian

Guardare il lato positivo

L'università, nonostante la dad ecc. "But for many it has also been a time of self-discovery. Some applied themselves to academics in a way they never would have if offered the familiar buffet of campus amusements. Some bonded with a tight group of friends. Many, like Ms. Alvarado, found that for the first time in their lives, they had been liberated from their carefully planned lives and their focus on getting the approval of others". Anemona Hartocollis, NYT

Ancora un romanzo di Le Carrè: Finished before his death in December, le Carré gave his blessing to publish the novel, which follows a bookseller who becomes embroiled in a spy leak. Alison Flood, The Guardian

Una preghiera di Isaac Singer

The prayer below was composed by Polish-born Jewish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer (ca. 1903-1991), whose published work includes numerous volumes of fiction, essays, memoir, and stories for children. It was handwritten on the back of a rent receipt made out to Singer by Riesner & Gottlieb, which shows he lived on 410 Central Park West, Apartment 12F, and that he paid $73.50 for March 1952. Tablet

Oh yes! The best books about sex. Kate Lister, The Guardian

The fall of the intellectual. Ross Douthat scans the landscape for novelists, filmmakers, intellectuals, and everywhere sees torpor and repetition, NS

What we got wrong

Il Guardian festeggia i suoi 200 anni raccontando i suoi peggiori errori. "But the most noticeable missteps stem not from the news pages but from the editorial column. For it is here that readers find out what the paper thinks about the great issues of the day. And it is here that mistakes are inked most indelibly into history, whether they relate to suffrage, reform or, most notably in recent years, the debate over Brexit." Randeep Ramesh, Guardian

New York

I walked to Central Park. It had suddenly become warm and I was so jet lagged I thought I might faint. I found a place near the entrance to the park under a tree and collapsed on to the grass. Lying on my back, looking up at the big American sky between the leaves, I saw something hanging from the branches. It was a key. A key on a red ribbon that someone had hung on a branch and forgotten to take with them. I wondered if they had deliberately left it behind because they were never going to return to wherever the key belonged. Or perhaps they wanted to close a door on a chapter of their life and leaving the key behind was a gesture of this desire. There is always something secret and mysterious about keys. They are the instrument to enter and exit, open and close, lock and unlock various desirable and undesirable domains. Deborah Levy sulle case che ha sognato e sogna, sempre sul Guardian

Come parlare di cose difficili, tipo la morte, i soldi e il sesso: ce lo spiega Anna Sale in questo podcast del New York Times

 

Academic Freedom

In the 21st century, however, academic freedom’s most determined adversaries are inside rather than outside academia. A growing army on college campuses would like to restrict the scope of intellectual debate by subjecting academic inquiry to political litmus tests. Over the 20th century, American universities’ students and faculty pushed to make them havens for heretics, dissenters, iconoclasts, and nonconformists. In the wake of their success, many scholars now demand that campuses adhere to their own orthodoxies. Until recently I would have said that many students and faculty want the range of intellectual debate on a college campus to be narrower than the offerings in the New York Times’s op-ed pages. But now, of course, the college graduates hired by the Times are scrubbing its op-ed pages of heresies as well. Keith E. Whittingtoh, Claremont Review of Books

Finalmente cominciano a levarsi voci contro la "cancel culture" nel mondo accademico americano.

Anche molto interessante l'articolo di Mattia Ferraresi sulla campagna giornalistica contro Astra Zeneca: On March 12, 2021, La Repubblica, Italy’s most widely circulated and trusted newspaper, placed a chilling headline on its front page: “AstraZeneca, Fear across Europe.” [...] 

The scare was amplified by the media, and La Repubblica’s headline stood out. Its language suggested to readers how they should feel, instead of describing the facts upon which readers should base their feelings. NiemanReports

Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times?

Participating in Facebook News doesn’t appear to deliver many new readers to outlets; the feature is very difficult to find, and it is not integrated into individuals’ newsfeeds. What Facebook News does deliver—though to only a handful of high-profile news organizations of its choosing—is serious amounts of cash. The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year, and a Facebook spokesperson told me that number is “not too far off at all.” But in at least one instance, the numbers are evidently much larger. In an interview last month, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year—“very much so.” [...]

And Facebook and Google money is, admittedly, all over journalism already. Virtually every major media nonprofit receives direct or indirect funding from Silicon Valley, including this one. When the Monthly gets grants from do-good organizations like NewsMatch, some of the funds originate with Facebook. [...]

But these three points are beyond dispute. [...]

First, the deals are a serious breach of traditional ethics. [...]

Second, these deals help Facebook maintain the public appearance of legitimacy. [...]

Finally, these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help. Dan Froomkin, Washington Monthly

Come altre volte, le notizie sul giornalismo le prendo dall'interessantissima newsletter del Post, Charlie.

Altre notizie della settimana:

The vital role of war, Linda Colley,The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World (Profile), recensito da Miles Taylor, The Guardian

Sempre sul Guardian i finalisti del Booker Prize. 

 

 

Dictionary of Lost Words

In 1901, a concerned member of the public wrote to the men compiling the first Oxford English Dictionary to let them know that there was a word missing. In 1857 the Unregistered Words Committee of the Philological Society of London had decided that Britain needed a successor to Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary. It had taken 40 years for the first volume – the letters A and B – to be published, and now they had only gone and left out a word.

The word was “bondmaid”, and when Australian author Pip Williams learned of its exclusion, she knew she had the makings of a novel. The Dictionary of Lost Words tells the story of the OED’s compilation through the fictional Esme, daughter of one of the men working on it, and her interactions with characters based on the real men and women behind the book.

A bondmaid is a young woman bound to serve until her death. Helen Sullivan, The Guardian

What does it mean to edit a cover?

A questa domanda risponde l'art editor del New Yorker, Françoise Mouly, disegnatrice francese che ora vive a York (tra l'altro è la moglie di Art Spiegelman e tra l'altro è stata l'ideatrice della copertina tutta nera dopo l'11 settembre 2001).

Even in the visual field, there are not many editors. There are art directors, but that’s slightly different. Art directors often illustrate a topic that’s given to them—the editor decides whom or what to put on the cover, and then it’s a matter of illustrating that concept or taking a photo of a politician or celebrity. With New Yorker covers, we aren’t usually illustrating a story. Our cover is a work in and of itself.

 

My job is twofold: to generate and collect ideas, and then to work with the artists to make the ideas as clear and effective as possible. Each December, I send out a calendar for the coming year with the hallmark dates: holidays, news events, the Oscars. (Everyone always wants to do the Halloween cover.) The calendar starts a dialogue with dozens of artists ...

Animal attraction et al.

When Lou, the narrator of Marian Engel’s 1976 novel, Bear, meets a real bear, she finds that “its nose was more pointed than she expected – years of corruption by teddy bears, she supposed”. He is no cuddly toy, but she becomes surprisingly intimate with him. [...] She shits next to the bear in the mornings (that will make the bear like her, she’s told), and delights in her verdant surroundings. The bear fascinates her: “His bigness, or rather his ability to change the impression he gave of his size, excited her.” This creature is both an animal and a metonym for masculinity, intimidating and comical by turns. He spends time in the house with her, by the fire, as she works. Reading a 19th-century biography of a famous Regency dandy, while “rubbing her foot in the thick black pelt of a bear”, she feels elated. Katherine Angel, The Guardian

No More Mozart? Classical Music V. Cancel Culture

The University of Oxford is planning to change its curriculum to focus on fewer white composers and more non-European music. Manuel Brug, WorldCrunch 

 

 

 

 

Inside America’s Most Interesting Magazine

Now, Harper’s is the weirdest place to work in New York media and yet an unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out in part because of its wide range, in style and substance, amid a homogenizing media landscape. Ben Smith, New York Times

Nella foto: John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s.

 

Ho trovato questo interessante articolo, sull'estremamente interessante newsletter "Charlie" del Post.