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

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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