Joan Didion’s ‘astonishingly intimate’ diary

A journal found in Joan Didion’s home is to be published in April.

Discovered in a filing cabinet next to the American writer’s desk after her death in 2021, Notes to John is addressed to Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003. Its entries begin in December 1999, and recount sessions Didion was having with a psychiatrist at the time. Lucy Knight, The Guardian

What Not to Wear

Chevreul died in 1889, 121 years before Instagram was invented, but had the platform been available to him, I think he would have done very well on it. There, and elsewhere on the social web, millions of people are still trying to figure out which shades look best on them. They are doing it via seasonal-color analysis, a quasi-scientific, quasi-philosophical discipline that holds that we all have a set of colors that naturally suit us, and a set that do not—that wash us out, make us look ruddy or green, emphasize our flaws, and minimize our beauty. Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic

BLACK IN BLUES

National Book Award winner Perry offers surprising revelations about the connection between the color blue and Black identity as she explores myth and literature, art and music, folklore and film. “Blues are our sensibility,” she writes. Kirkus Reviews

il libro di cui si parla è Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My Peopl, di Imani Perry (Ecco/HarperCollins)

The Grammar of Angels

Of all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. [...] An Italian aristocrat who dabbled in magic and escaped from prison after eloping with the wife of a Medici lord, his books were burned on the orders of the pope. Edward Wilson-Lee’s new biography brings us the events of Pico’s short, blazing life, but also what is most strange and attractive about him: the wonder of a scholar who felt himself on the verge of being able to commune with angels. [...]

Once he had mastered the orthodox disciplines, Pico found himself hungry for more. He sought out Jewish scholars to teach him Hebrew and Arabic, and became convinced that there were secrets in the ancient texts of the east, accessible only only to those who knew how to interpret them. Writing excitedly to a friend, he declared that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible contained “the entire knowledge of all arts and wisdom both divine and human”. Unfortunately there was a catch: “This knowledge is hidden and concealed.” Dennis Duncan, The Guardian

recensione alla nuova biografia di Pico della Mirandola di Edward Wilson-Lee dal titolo affascinante, The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language (William Collins).