Colette, Pig-Pen and Intelligence

che cos'hanno in comune Colette, Pig-Pen e l'intelligenza? Che sono tutti qui, questa settimana. Di Colette, che sta godendo di grande popolarità in America al momento, ci parla Michael LaPointe sul New Yorker:

Physical beauty was always important to Colette. She prized the body over the mind—as suggested by the title of Judith Thurman’s excellent biography, “Secrets of the Flesh”—and believed that focussing on the physical was essential to writing “like a woman, without anything moralistic or theoretical.” 

di Pig-Pen ci parla Elif Batuman su Astra: 

Readers’ love of Pig-Pen was reportedly a burden to Charles M. Schulz. Much as Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 only to bring him back nine years later, so did Schultz write Pig-Pen out of the series from 1967 to 1976. Pig-Pen himself is not uninfluenced by Conan Doyle: he is, in essence, a walking clue. “I can tell just where you’ve been all week from the dirt on your clothes,” Charlie Brown tells a consternated Pig-Pen in August 1965, proceeding to rattle off a series of dusty locations.] [... Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows.

infine Tom Bartlett affronta la controversa questione del rapporto genetica-intelligenza umana:

Research on human intelligence tends to be a magnet for controversy, with papers leading to protests and speakers drawing scorn. [...] Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows. The Chronicle of Higher Education