Texting etiquette

It’s ironic. Texting was meant to make communication easier, but it can be much harder to discern someone’s tone over text, especially with inflections as subtle as sarcasm. 

It’s not as straightforward as tacking a crying-laughing-face emoji onto the end of a message either—sorry, but you are officially Old if you unironically use emojis. Your options are “lol” (which can sometimes come across as quite passive aggressive), “haha” (again, this sounds too abrupt), or, my personal favourite, “lmao” (which translates as a hyperbolic but less blunt “laughing my ass off,” for those who didn’t know). That said—“loool” or “hahahaha” are also good options. Serena Smith, Prospect

in effetti mi rendo conto di quanto siamo diventati bravi a individuare le emozioni nei messaggini! Sempre riguardo la nuova tecnologia e la sua ingerenza ovunque, anche nei sentimenti e nell'arte, da leggere l'articolo di John Herrman intitolato "Intelligencer" sul New York Magazine.

infine un bell'articolo sul lavoro che sta dietro all'uscita di un'opera letteraria straniera (scouting, traduzione, editing, ecc.), "Breaking Into English" di Lily Meyer, Los Angeles Review of Books 

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan, slumped on a comfortable couch in the large formal sitting room of his Cotswolds manor house, dazzling early-summer sun filtering through the tall, narrow windows, tells me he has been suffering from a protracted bout of pessimism. Adam Begley, The Atlantic

bel ritratto dello scrittore. E anche, come è nata l'idea dei libri per bambini, Choose Your Own Adventure Books:

You were a girl who wanted to choose your own adventures. Which is to say, you were a girl who never had adventures. You always followed the rules. But, when you ate an entire sleeve of graham crackers and sank into the couch with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you got to imagine that you were getting into trouble in outer space, or in the future, or under the sea. You got to make choices every few pages: Do you ask the ghost about her intentions, or run away? Do you rebel against the alien overlords, or blindly obey them? Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker

Jean Rhys

There isn’t an adjective more appropriate than “haunted” to describe the deeply troubled, self-lacerating, and finally (to a degree) triumphant life of the Caribbean-born Jean Rhys. As presented by Miranda Seymour in I Used to Live Here Once [Norton], her richly detailed, exhaustively researched, and warmly sympathetic new biography, Rhys appears to have been haunted by memories of her girlhood on the small, largely impoverished island of Dominica, then a British colony. Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review

How Toxic Is Masculinity?

Ten years ago, Hanna Rosin’s book, “The End of Men,” argued that feminism had largely achieved its aims, and that it was time to start worrying about the coming obsolescence of men. American women were getting more undergraduate and graduate degrees than American men, and were better placed to flourish in a “feminized” job market that prized communication and flexibility. For the first time in American history, they were outnumbering men in the workplace. “The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” Rosin wrote.The events of the past decade—the rise of Trump, the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—have had a sobering effect on this sort of triumphalism. The general tone of feminist rhetoric has grown distinctly tougher and more cynical. Zoë Heller, The New Yorker

inoltre, un lungo articolo/chiacchierata su e con Ian McEwan, che parla dell'attacco a Salman Rushdie e del suo nuovo libro, Lessons (Vintage).

We had met earlier in the summer to discuss McEwan’s epic new novel, Lessons, in which the fatwa issued against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses in 1989 appears as part of the novel’s far-reaching look at postwar British history. “It was a watershed moment for those of us around Salman,” he says now. For writers, intellectuals and artists in the 70s or 80s, religion wasn’t an issue: “We didn’t even deny religion, it just didn’t come up.” So when the fatwa was decreed, “it was explosive. It cut across the sort of multicultural assumptions we had at the time. People whom we naturally most wanted to defend from racism were burning books in Bradford.” Lisa Allardice, The Guardian