The End of the English Major

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. Nathan Heller, New Yorker

un articolo molto interessante, che collega il declino delle humanities ai costi stellari delle università americane e ai conseguenti debiti che gli studenti devono ripagare alla fine degli studi, ma anche a molti altri fattori, come al fatto che molti studenti hanno idee vaghe su che cosa siano le humanities. Colpa nostra, anche. Comunque da leggere.

sempre sul New Yorker, un bell'articolo sui mondi di Italo Calvino, Mavellous Things, Merve Emre.

ancora su Old Babes in the Wood (Chatto & Windus),  Lisa O'Kelly interevista Margaret Atwood, The Guardian

e anche:  

Growing numbers of women in UK are joining forces with friends to run independent bookshops, Nadia Khomami, The Guardian

e la longlist dell'International Booker Prize, sempre sul Guardian

 

The Real Work

What does it mean to master a skill – drawing, dancing or driving – and how do you actually do it? That is the question New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik asks in The Real Work, and it becomes the springboard for a discussion of art, family, empathy, mortality. Via memoir, analysis and criticism he assembles a celebration of the flaws that make us human. Matthew Cantor, The Guardian

The Real Work è pubblicato da Quercus. Un altro libro degno di nota, questa settimana, è Old Babes in the Wood di Margaret Atwood (Penguin, recensito da Sam Leith, sempre sul Guardian.

Intelligenza umana, animale, artificiale

But rather than being our crowning glory as a species, is it possible that human intelligence is in fact a liability, the source of our existential angst and increasingly apparent talent for self-destruction? This is the question Gregg sets out to answer in his entertaining and original book. PD Smith, The Guardian

il libro di cui parla Smith è: If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity di Justin Gregg. E sull'intelligenza artificiale, vi proponiamo questo articolo, che rimanda ad altri:

ChatGPT in late November, people began wondering what it would mean for teaching and learning. A widely read piece in The Atlantic that provided one of the first looks at the tool’s ability to put together high-quality writing concluded that it would kill the student essay. Since then, academics everywhere have done their own experimenting with the technology — and weighed in on what to do about it. Some have banned students from using it, while others have offered tips on how to create essay assignments that are AI-proof. Ben Chrisinger, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Forbidden Notebook

Published in Italy in 1952, this intimate, quietly subversive novel is told through the increasingly frantic secret diary entries of a woman named Valeria. Against a backdrop of postwar trauma and deprivation, Valeria struggles with her household’s finances, a romance with her boss, her husband’s professional dissatisfactions, and her grownup children’s love affairs. Confiding these tensions to her diary—the only outlet for expression in her cramped life—she awakens to society’s treatment of working wives and confronts a deep ambivalence toward her husband and children. She concludes that all women, to make sense of their world, “hide a black notebook, a forbidden diary. And they all have to destroy it.” New Yorker

Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Céspedes, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Astra House).