BUONE VACANZE!

Vado in vacanza. Riprenderò a pubblicare i miei post su novità varie nel mondo dei libri in USA, e nel mondo anglofono in generale, all'inizio di settembre.

Buone vacanze a tutti!

Nuovi libri sulla matematica

Nuovi libri sulla matematica di Jordan Ellenberg, David J. Hand, Michael Blastland e David Spiegelhalter, Amir Alexander, e Alex Bellos. "Every math teacher cringes at the inevitable question from students: “When am I ever going to use this?” Ellenberg, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin, admits that even though we’ll never need to compute long lists of integrals in our daily lives, we still need math. It’s “a science of not being wrong about things,” he writes, and it gives us tools to enhance our reasoning, which is prone to false assumptions and cognitive biases". nytbooks.

Avoid the Ivy League

William Deresiewicz consiglia di evitare le Ivy League e sull'argomento ha scritto un libro che uscirà ad agosto, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press). "I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history". newrepublic.

Il piacere della risata

Una bella risata, c'è poco di più piacevole. Eppure la risata pare sia ancora un mistero. Ne parla Mary Beard, prof. di Classics all'University of Cambridge e autrice del libro Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (University of California Press). "The pleasure and excitement of studying laughter, for a historian, is that it generates many more questions than answers. Theories of laughter have always been "theories of theories," a way of talking about laughter and "something else." Recent neurological advances in understanding which bits of the brain generate laughter (and how) are, of course, important, and not to be dismissed by decidedly nonexperimental historians.
But in historical terms, culture almost always trumps nature. Laughter has been a key marker of what we feel about other cultures, about our own past and our views of the "progress of civilization." chronicle.

Freaky Friday

Freaky Friday è il titolo di un libro del 1972 di Mary Rodgers Guettel, scrittrice e compositrice inglese morta il mese scorso a 83 anni. In italiano si intitola A ciascuno il suo corpo, ma non si trova più. Sembra carino. "Mary Rodgers Guettel, who died at the end of June, was not a household name like her father, the composer Richard Rodgers, but she had legions of fans—among them her lifelong friend Stephen Sondheim; Leonard Bernstein; the legendary children’s-book editor Ursula Nordstrom; Juilliard students, who chanted her name affectionately when she addressed them, as the chair of the school’s board in recent years; and a great many children. Rodgers published “Freaky Friday,” her freewheeling mother-daughter body-switch novel, in 1972, and followed it with two enjoyable sequels, “A Billion for Boris” and “Summer Switch.” Sarah Larson, newyorker.

Libri che fanno piangere

Un interessante articolo su quali sono i libri che fanno piangere, e come e perché. Pelagia Horgan, "Tears have had a surprisingly prominent place in the history of the novel. Readers have always asked about the role that emotion plays in reading: What does it mean to be deeply moved by a book? Which books are worthy objects of our feelings? In different eras, people answered those questions in different ways". newyorker.

Privacy secondo Virginia Woolf

Joshua Rothman discute della privacy e soprattutto di quel che significava per Virginia Woolf, "Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of privacy". newyorker.

The Children of Silicon Valley

Robert Pogue Harrison, prof. di letteratura a Stanfod, sulla Silicon Valley, "In truth Silicon Valley does not change the world as much as it changes my way of being in it, or better, of not being in it. It changes the way I think, the way I emote, and the way I interact with others. It corrodes the worldly core of my humanity, leaving me increasingly worldless. (I do not consider the Internet’s Borg collective, with its endless drone of voices, a world, any more than I consider social media a human society; those who do not see the difference have already been assimilated.). nybooks.

The Last Literary Taboos

Questo è il tema discusso da due scrittori questa settimana sul New York Times. Gli scrittori sono Francine Prose e James Parker. Francine Prose, "One hears about manuscripts turned down for being too this, too that, too dark, too cerebral, too unsympathetic, too strange; about editors rejecting books that kept them awake all night reading — but in the cold light of morning, they couldn’t convince their colleagues that an audience for such a book existed". nyt.

Life at 60

My generation, the postwar baby-boomers, are over the meridian of our vital parabolas. We’ve done our best and our worst, overachieved and underperformed, are either preparing to bask on the sun loungers of our success or suck our bruised fingers in the waiting rooms of failure. So 60 is both a personal summit from which to look back, breathing heavily, hands on my knees, and a generational one. ... 
How do I feel having reached 60? Well, surprised, mostly. And grateful. When I was 30, a doctor told me that I had a dangerously damaged liver and, all things considered, I probably wouldn’t see another Christmas. I am an alcoholic and a drug addict but, with a lot of help, I stopped. I haven’t had a drink or picked up a drug since. AA Gill (nella foto con il padre) e i suoi primi sessant'anni. thesundaytimes.