Fawning

It is the afternoon of the fawn. Everywhere you turn, in workplaces and households alike, yearlings with saucer eyes, brown felt noses, and stilt-like legs are wondering if you’re mad at them. The fawn response, as it’s known in some precincts of social media, bundles various forms of ingratiating, people-pleasing behavior. It can manifest in threatening situations, where expressing authentic emotion could elicit a powerful person’s wrath or cruelty, or it might be more banal: laughing at a vindictive supervisor’s unfunny joke, saying you love a gift when you don’t, laboring over the perfect string of whimsical emojis to append to an opinion that you’ve expressed over text. Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

fawning, un termine che non conoscevo per un concetto che conosco molto bene. L'IA lo definisce in questo modo: a survival response where someone tries to stay safe by pleasing, appeasing, or agreeing with others—especially people perceived as threatening or powerful. Quale potrebbe essere la traduzione italiana? Sempre l'IA suggerisce: compiacenza, servilismo, adulazione, sottomissione accomodante, comportamento remissivo. Io aggiungerei anche leccaculaggine 

The New Yorker Story

All my life, I’ve heard about this thing, “the New Yorker story”. I hadn’t investigated this term in depth, but I understood it to mean “a short story that is meandering, plotless, and slight—full of middle-class people discussing their relentlessly banal problems”. Woman of Letters

un lunghissimo articolo (troppo lungo! ma interessante) che fa la storia delle storie del New Yorker, da come e quando hanno cominciato ad apparire sulla rivista, alla loro evoluzione, e soprattutto cerca di definire i tratti che le contraddistinguono.

Departure(s)

Julian Barnes tells us that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last instalment of a writing career spanning 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction. Many of these works turn up here, whether obliquely or overtly, referred to through subject matter, style, tone or connotation; in the contemporary cultural argot, which Barnes is fond of examining, these writerly winks might be known as Easter eggs. Alex Clark, The Guardian

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes is published by Jonathan Cape. 

triste! 

Ai Weiwei On Censorship

Given that there can be few contemporary artists who have thought more about censorship – its goals, techniques, efficacy – than Ai, it’s inevitable this new book, which runs to fewer than 90 pages, will be read as his distilled wisdom on the topic. Censorship, he asserts, is no new phenomenon: during the Shang dynasty (1600-1046BC) a saying emerged – “the great affairs of the state are worship and military bases”.

But Ai’s main argument is that censorship is neither a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, nor something confined to “countries defined as autocratic and authoritarian”. In the west – “the so-called free world”, with its “ostensibly democratic societies” – free speech is a chimera, regulated through “more covert, more deceptive and more corrosive” means. Flexing his rhetoric, he describes censorship “as both an indispensable tool of mental enslavement and a fundamental source of political corruption”. Sukhdev Sandhu, The Guardian

On Censorship by Ai Weiwei is published by Thames & Hudson