The Hottest Club In Town? The Convent

Before we had hot girl summers and girl dinners, before there were GRWM’s and OOTD’s, and before the days of wellness retreats and GOOP goodies that promise to keep you happy, healthy, and wise, there were convents. While the trappings of modern comforts dominate social media feeds, as influencers galavant on White Lotus-style trips, documenting it all with cinematic precision, another phenomena has slowly been closing its grip on the algorithms, particularly of young women: convent content.

Whether it’s nuns documenting their day to day lives or young women sharing their experiences booking retreats at convents, the increasing popularity of convent begs the question: are nuns the ultimate, the first, and the most enduring lifestyle influencers of them all?

In their new book, Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life, Brown University scholars and best friends Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita seek to answer that and more. Caroline Reilly, Forbes

notate la prosa molto "ivy league" dell'articolo 

 

Brown University declines to join federal Compact

In a Wednesday, Oct. 15, letter to federal officials, Brown University President Christina H. Paxson declined the invitation for Brown to join the White House’s proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.

Paxson led the letter asserting the importance of a strong relationship between the government and higher education and noted that Brown and the government have a resolution agreement in place that already commits the University to a set of principles. However, she contrasted that existing agreement with the Compact, which does not include safeguards for protecting academic speech.

“I am concerned that the Compact by its nature and by various provisions would restrict academic freedom and undermine the autonomy of Brown’s governance, critically compromising our ability to fulfill our mission,” Paxson wrote. “Additionally, a fundamental part of academic excellence is awarding research funding on the merits of the research being proposed. The cover letter describing the Compact contemplates funding research on criteria other than the soundness and likely impact of research, which would ultimately damage the health and prosperity of Americans.” News from Brown

nell’ambiente universitario americano, e non solo, si parla molto del Compact, mentre qui da noi mi sembra che se ne discuta poco. Eppure avrà implicazioni anche per noi: per gli studenti italiani che vorranno andare a studiare negli Stati Uniti, e che incontreranno difficoltà sempre maggiori, e per i programmi di scambio universitario con gli USA, che disporranno di meno fondi e potrebbero risultare meno attraenti per alcune università.

A new global gender divide is emerging

One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology. Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others? 

The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on the topic, is that today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter. Gen Z is two generations, not one. In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye. In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up. John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times

l'articolo risale a circa due anni fa, è datato 26 gennaio 2024, ma l'ho scoperto ora e lo trovo molto interessante e ancora rilevante, anche guardando alla situazione italiana 

UNABRIDGED

Journalist Fatsis, author of the kindred book Word Freak, talked his way into the headquarters of Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Massachusetts, after learning that “the company was overhauling its foundational book, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged.” The last major revision had occurred decades earlier, in 1961, totaling some 465,000 words—and, given that speakers of the English language were coining words (“Doomscrolling one year, cheugy another, rizz the next”) far faster than the dictionary could keep up with, there was plenty to do. Kirkus Review

A Brief History of U.S. Research Funding

Before World War II, the federal government didn’t fund research. But after scientists with the Manhattan Project helped win the war, the U.S. was convinced that university research was a great national investment. Until now. A look back at how we got here. Will Bunch, Brown Alumni Magazine

How Sober Should a Writer Be?

Drinking in America has been on the decline. Myriad articles report this, some trendy, some clinical. [...] The first place I noticed this change was in confessional nonfiction. [...] Then I began to notice the same phenomenon in fiction, except in reverse. [...] Refreshingly, onto our sober bar cart lands On Booze, a slim showcase of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most spirited pieces, which will be reissued next month. [...] But there’s nothing quite like binging from the source. For all of Dorothy Parker’s quips about cocktails and Charles Bukowski’s bromides about beer, Fitzgerald’s prose alcohol content remains unparalleled—the irony being that he was a lightweight, forever trying to keep pace with Hemingway. As the critic John Lanchester wrote of him, “If ever there was someone who simply should not have drunk at all, it was Fitzgerald.” The prolific author’s life ended tragically, at forty-four, but damn if he couldn’t make a glamorous time seem regular. Sloane Crosley, The Yale Review

Why Diet Coke From McDonald's Is Just Better

Magical origins aside, I wondered if there was more traditional scholarly support for why McDonald’s Diet Coke is objectively better than others? Cursory internet research reveals that several key factors play into how McDonald’s Diet Coke distinguishes itself, including but not limited to the composition, a top-notch filtration system and temperature control.

When it comes quality, the nuances are in the nitty-gritty. To delve into the finer points of the McDonald’s Diet Coke popularity (and the reasons for this phenomenon) I consulted with scientists, engineers, current and former McDonald’s employees, and one of the world’s leading experts on carbonation, Brown University professor Roberto Zenit.

The conclusion? Every step of the way, McDonald’s goes the extra mile to ensure the best Diet Coke experience. Fundamentally, it comes down to a superior solute (syrup) to solvent (water) mixture to yield the solution (har) that is Diet Coke. Joanna O'Leary, HuffPost

quel che ho sempre amato dell'America è che qualsiasi cosa possa diventare oggetto di studio, anche nelle grandi università.  

Political extremists brains

When people with extreme political views see politically charged content, their brains process the information in the same way — even when their views are at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.

That’s according to a new study led by psychological and cognitive researchers and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research provides psychological evidence for the theory of horseshoe politics, which holds that the views of people at the far left and far right of the political spectrum resemble each other more closely than they do people with moderate views. Corrie Pikul, News from Brown

ah, ah, ah! Lo immaginavo... 

Inependent Presses

Publishing’s Big Five (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster) still dominate bestseller charts and prize lists: this year’s Booker longlist features five titles from Penguin alone. But independent presses are increasingly moving into the spotlight.

Sheffield-based And Other Stories is one such example, having won this year’s International Booker prize with Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. It was “instructive” that this year’s shortlist was entirely indies, says the press’s publicist Michael Watson. Indies are “frequently the ones publishing the most interesting and exciting writers and books in innovative ways, often in the face of enormous challenges”.

You may recognise the stripped-back design of And Other Stories books, with a black and white text-based cover, launched in 2023. Distinctive, homogenous covers are a running theme across many indie presses: Fitzcarraldo Editions publishes its fiction in an International Klein Blue cover, its nonfiction in white. While this perhaps simply comes down to financial constraints, the streamlining means titles are instantly recognisable for readers browsing bookshops.

[...]

The Southbank Centre’s first Indie Night will take place in February next year, hosted by Okechukwu Nzelu, author of The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney, and Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts. The series aims to celebrate indie presses and their authors. “Independent publishing is the nutrient base from which everything positive and progressive grows in UK literature,” says Max Porter, resident artist at the Southbank. “Without our indie presses we have no counter culture.”

If you’re wanting to dig into some exciting work by UK indies, Bogen suggests looking out for Fosse’s first novel since winning the Nobel, Vaim, translated by Damion Searls and publishing next month, while Watson nominates Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben, published in August (which “rivals anything by Virginia Woolf”, according to Melissa Harrison’s Guardian review).

 

The biggest books of the autumn

Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… The Guardian