What is it that makes books so magical?

Such is the gist of Marriott’s first book, The New Dark Ages, a polemical elegy tracing the rise and fall of print from Montaigne to Mr Beast. The point is modest – scroll less, read more – but the tone is grandiose. Literacy turbocharged our capacity for complex argument, he argues, but adds that “conversation is very far from useless”, and says “literate civilisation … has never produced a work of art with quite the same quality of heroic starkness as the Iliad or Beowulf”. Anthony Cummins, The Guardian

recensione a The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society di James Marriott (Bodley Head);

vedi anche: 

It feels as if we’re increasingly seeing bookshops doubling as coffee shops or wine bars in recent years, as business owners try to broaden their customer base in tough financial times. “Bookshops are the Swiss army knives of retail,” the Bookseller Association managing director Meryl Halls tells me. They are “constantly adding new tools to remain cutting-edge while always staying rooted in books and reading”.

Yet, as Pettegree points out in The Bookshop, this survival instinct has a long precedent: in the 17th century, few shopkeepers would “risk their livelihoods on the exclusive sale of books”, with most offering a range of other goods too – stationery, medical supplies, newspapers – effectively, they were general stores.

 

Twilight of the Dons

Colin Kidd’s intriguing new history of Oxbridge intellectual life, Twilight of the Dons, explains the snub not as a powerful display of academic censure, but as the death throes of a declining cultural force. 

In the 1950s, the academics of Oxford and Cambridge universities enjoyed high prestige, freedom and confidence. They constituted nothing short of a “secular clerisy,” entrusted with the maintenance of civilised values and higher truths, and expected to lead debates within British public life. From hosting college dinners for cabinet ministers to dominating BBC current affairs programming to provisioning the intelligence services with promising students, Oxbridge dons held deep reservoirs of social capital and political power. Tristram Hunt, Financial Times

un libro molto interessante per cercare di capire il mondo universitario d'elite di Oxbridge. Il libro viene anche recensito da Fedirico Varese sul Domenicale del Sole 24 Ore del 20/9/2026.

Per rimanere nell'ambito dell'education anglosassone ed europeo in generale, da leggere anche questo articolo, "European education powerhouses rocked by falling scores in global study", Jon Henley, Deborah Cole in Berlin, Angelique Chrisafis in Paris and Miranda Bryant Nordic correspondent, The Guardian

How to make a bestseller

Think about the last book you bought. How did you choose it? Was it from a recommendation, a review, a TikTok video? Did the cover grab you, were you swayed by the quotes on the front, or did you just happen to spot it on an appealing table as you walked into the shop? Did you think about all the nudges that led you to that decision – by the publisher, the bookseller or that person you follow on Insta?

The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. “It’s all about the art of persuasion,” says Philip Gwyn Jones, who was a publisher for more than 30 years and is now a literary agent. And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from BookTokers and online influencers, social media videos, podcasts and Instagram posts. How is all this changing publishing? John Self, The Guardian

What makes a good comic novel?

Nobody knows what a comic novel is. And once you start discussing it, all the fun runs out. EB White compared it to dissecting a frog (you’re left with innards and a dead frog) but I would compare it to turning all the lights on at a party: everyone looks terrible and you’ve ruined the party. [...] I think they are books that decide something is funny, as Jerry Seinfeld once defined comedy. In Moby-Dick, it’s a coin nailed to a masthead. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, it’s the worst best poem you’ve ever read. And yet we feel we’re getting at something the most solemn narratives aim for: an understanding of the human condition, of grief, of love, of death. All the big stuff. The comic novels I love are books that could just as easily have been tragedies. It is simply that the author has decided it’s funny. Andrew Sean Greer, The Guardian

How Brown University is navigating the rise of generative AI use in the classroom

Among its key findings, the report revealed that while most students report using generative AI in the course of their studies, many of those same students worry that it is negatively affecting their long-term cognition. Faculty members shared these concerns, and while many faculty have begun using AI in some capacity in teaching or research, many course syllabi do not adequately establish clear expectations or limitations on AI use. News from Brown

intervista interessante, in particolare per gli insegnanti 

Art Spiegelman

He is 78 years old, slight and scruffy-looking, with a grizzled goatee and wispy grey hair, and he can still talk faster than most people can think. He offers me a coffee when I arrive at his home on a sweltering June day, but then keeps getting distracted from making it by his own anecdotes. He takes me on an impromptu tour, showing me the living room that held Mouly’s huge, 1,000lb Multilith printing press, until they had a toddler and it became too dangerous to keep. There is a mural painted by the cartoonist Gary Panter on the living room wall, and another just above their bed, painted to replace a set of bookshelves that collapsed onto the couple when they were asleep, breaking Mouly’s nose and prompting a big book clear out. “Is this book worth dying for?” Spiegelman says they asked of themselves, a more hardcore alternative to Swedish death cleaning, but even so there are full bookshelves in every room, and pieces of art and curios everywhere. Sophie McBain, The Guardian

a settembre uscirà una nuova edizione di In the Shadow of No Towers di Art Spiegelman presso Penguin 

The biggest books this autumn

Midlife meditations from Barbara Kingsolver; musical portraits by Jonathan Coe and Yiyun Li; plus memoirs from Dustin Hoffman and Judi Dench – all among the coming season’s highlights. The Guardian

Wielding the Blue Pencil

The editor came late to British publishing. Until well after the end of the Second World War, the man—and it usually was a man—who examined manuscripts sent in by prospective authors, wrote reports on them, and ultimately recommended whether they should be accepted or turned down was known as a “publisher’s reader.” Generally speaking, this functionary’s status was not high. He regularly operated from home or came into the office part-time. There were occasions when he worked simultaneously for several different firms, and in most cases his comments on the material he had to inspect were vestigial in the extreme. Evelyn Waugh’s older brother, Alec, employed by his father’s firm Chapman & Hall in the 1920s, remembered simply scrawling the acronym “NBG” (“No bloody good”) on the title page of anything that seemed conspicuously devoid of merit. D. J. Taylor, Portico

The End of Reading Is Here

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet. Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic

a questo articolo allarmante, risponde un articolo generato dall'AI sul Foglio AI 

The Catcher in the Rye at 75

The action takes place over three days and nights in December 1949. Our narrator, Holden Caulfield, is 17, chronicling events that befell him a year ago, when he was expelled from his boarding school, Pencey Prep, where the only thing he learned is that “All morons hate it when you call them a moron.” A restless, unknowingly witty Irish-American kid, he has a wry watchfulness that counterpoints his naivety. Flitting from Pencey a few days early, he bunks off to Manhattan, where his parents and sister live. The plan is to put up in a flophouse and assemble his excuses. A born fantasist, he can’t resist dissembling to anyone he meets along the way, but his gaucheness keeps tripping him up. “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.” Joseph O'Connor, The Guardian

The Catcher in the Rye (pubblicato in Italia con il titolo Il giovane Holden) è uscito negli Stati Uniti il 16 luglio 1951, pubblicato dalla casa editrice Little, Brown and Company.