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. 

Chasing new skills

But since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, more than 600,000 US tech workers have lost their jobs, according to the tech layoff tracker Layoff.fyi. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for computer science graduates rose to 7% in 2024, up from 6.1% the previous year, and their underemployment rate was more than 19%, data from the New York Fed shows. US tech job postings on Indeed also dropped 36% from 2020 to 2025.

Experts are unsure what’s next for software engineers, but they agree on one thing: coding skills may be losing value, but the ability to evaluate AI-written code is becoming more important. Varsha Bansal, The Guardian

Love and sex in the age of apps

There is a scene in Annie Lord’s novel that will be instantly familiar to any young person who has spent time at a pub or nightclub recently. Daisy and Maya, two best friends in their mid-20s, are lamenting the paltry state of the dating market.

“It’s just shit out there,” Daisy says. “Every time we go out there’s, like, one decent single guy and then about 40 gorgeous women with master’s degrees and shag haircuts and what’s even the point in trying.”

“That so fits with my experience … dating is very bleak at the moment,” Lord laughs, when we sit down in an east London cafe. “Something’s got to give!” The 30-year-old writer has built a career out of observing the intracacies and intimacies of modern dating. Emma Loffhagen, The Guardian

il libro di cui si parla è: The Project, Annie Lord (Harvill)

On the Mark

How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised writer”. Martin Amis called them “joke badges”, and Theodor Adorno “soundless cymbal-crashing”. The novelist Elmore Leonard specified that you were allowed only two or three every 100,000 words. He was being generous. Steven Poole, The Guardian

recensione di: On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat is published by Basic 

What’s So Great About the Great Books?

What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia; Princeton University Press

It would be tempting to put Naomi Kanakia’s new book on the crowded shelf of recent works that have sought to defend the importance of a liberal arts education, particularly the humanities. Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates (2021) is the most logical precursor to set it beside. But in championing Great Books, Kanakia is not staking out ground in campus curriculum debates. Instead, she addresses the lay reader, Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” the nonacademic reader who, like Kanakia, may have spent formative years reading science fiction or fantasy more than literary fiction or philosophy. A convert to the Great Books in her 20s, Kanakia wants the Gone Girl reader (her example) to at least consider moving on to Proust and Middlemarch. Todd Shy, The American Scholar

Mel Brooks at 100

Mel Brooks’ story is that of the US and Jews and American Jewish comedy. He was born on the kitchen table of a tenement in Brooklyn a century ago in the same month Marilyn Monroe made her own entrance on the opposite coast. The son of European immigrants, Brooks was brought up by his mother after his father died when Melvin was just two years old. He was a small, sickly child and the youngest of four brothers, perhaps an explanation for an almost pathological desire for attention. In the words of his colleague Larry Gelbart: “Mel thought when he got slapped in the ass by the doctor who delivered him that was applause, and he has not stopped performing since.” [...]

He is the son of immigrants who fought the Nazis and ultimately triumphed in every area of showbusiness. He is the American dream made flesh. Brooks might not live to be 2,000, but 100 years looked equally implausible when he served in the 78th Infantry division. When asked the secret to a long life after a screening of Blazing Saddles I attended in London years ago, this icon of American entertainment offered some sage advice he has evidently lived by: “Don’t die.” Darren Richman, The Guardian 

auguri, Mel Brooks, avanti fino a 120 anni! 

70 brilliant books for the summer

 

 

 

The Guardian 

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Reiko Hiroyama lives on Ishigaki, a subtropical island in Japan. One morning, she went out to comb the beach near her house. Beachcombing conjures up a leisurely world of sand dollars and Daiquiris, but Hiroyama’s practice was actually about bringing in the trash. Over the years, she’d retrieved flip-flops, jerricans, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, fishing nets, and a seemingly endless array of bottles—jugs, flasks, milk bottles, beer bottles, water bottles, detergent bottles, baby bottles, motor-oil bottles. Yet that day a turquoise glass bottle caught her eye. Its neck was sticking out of the sand. There was a scroll-like object inside. “The sunlight shining on it gave it a strong presence,” Hiroyama recalled. “It seemed to say, ‘I’m here!’ ”

The cap was so thoroughly rusted that she couldn’t twist it off, so she decided to break the bottle open on a rock. “My heart was pounding,” she said. She extracted the scroll: a sheet of white paper covered in cursive handwriting. Hiroyama’s spirits sank when she realized that the letter was written in French. Lauren Collins, The New Yorker

Open to interpretation

The International Booker prize for translated fiction went to Taiwan Travelogue, written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. Emma Loffhagen spoke to the pair, who will share the £50,000 prize, about Taiwanese politics, LGBTQ+ rights and more.

The International Booker rewards exceptional works of translation. But for this novel, translation takes centre stage in more ways than one: the work is presented as a translation of a rediscovered text, and one of the main characters is a Taiwanese interpreter. In today’s Bookmarks, we look at why translators and interpreters make fascinating protagonists, and why the singular roles they play in fiction reflect the value of their work in the real world.

There is a long tradition of novels featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists. In Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, published in 2001, Gen Watanabe bridges communication between captors and captives in a hostage crisis. Ricardo, the narrator of Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2006 novel The Bad Girl, is an interpreter for Unesco. More recently, Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, Polly Barton’s What Am I, a Deer?, and, indeed, Taiwan Travelogue, have translators or interpreters at the centre of the action.

aggiungo Marias, Un cuore così bianco, uno dei miei scrittori e dei miei libri preferiti. 

a proposito di traduzione, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation by Daniel Hahn (Canongate), recensito da Steven Pool, The Guardian