A Comma in the Blood

The Italian author Natalia Ginzburg examined a wide range of topics, but it was not until the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics that she chose to write about her Jewishness. Her piece, bluntly titled “The Jews” (“Gli Ebrei”), appeared in the daily La Stampa on Sept. 14, 1972, nine days after the killings, and has recently been translated into English for the first time. Its perspective on the tensions surrounding the relationship between Jews and the state of Israel is acutely relevant in the wake of Oct. 7. We also now have the immediate responses to her provocative essay from fellow Italian intellectuals and authors, including the likes of Alberto Moravia and Primo Levi. These can be found, translated into English and with commentary by the literary critic Domenico Scarpa, in the collection Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies. Kenneth Sherman, Tablet

la compassione universale, schierarsi con i perdenti, è morale?

Is Careerism Ruining College?

The fundamental questions: Have the scales of academia—weighed down by soaring tuition and the expensive real world that awaits Gen Z college grads—tipped too far toward pre-professionalism, a term for careerism on steroids? And are students too focused on getting into the right campus clubs and nabbing the perfect internships to reap the advantages of a diverse, liberal-arts education? 

For Sangeeta Bhatia ’90, liberal arts and high-level career success are not contradictory concepts—they’re directly related. While Bhatia says her parents told her she could choose from three careers, doctor, engineer, or entrepreneur (she became all three, with a PhD to boot), she feels her coursework in humanities was key to her ultimate success as a biomedical entrepreneur.  [...]

“I describe the process of invention as a bit like writing a song,” Bhatia says. “You start in one direction and make it up as you go. You form collabs with others. You riff. Creating something out of nothing and imagining the future requires inspiration—and to be inspired, students need to be exposed to as much outside of their field as in it.” Will Bunch, Brown Alumni Magazine

leggi anche The Gender Q, sempre sul Brown Alumni Magazine, 

 

How Indo-European languages went global

How did the language you’re reading this in come to exist? The Indo-European family of languages covers most of Europe, the Iranian plateau, northern India and parts of Asia. Its members are spoken by almost half of all living people, and they all stem from a common source. English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Norse and many others (more than 400 still exist) can all be traced back to this starting point: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Laura Spinney’s new book tells the story of how a language that may initially have been spoken as a kind of lingua franca by only a few dozen people evolved into the mother tongues of billions. Henry Oliver, The Guardian

il libro di cui si parla è Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global di Laura Spinney pubblicato da William Collins

Epic win: why the Odyssey is having a moment

We live in an Odyssey time. The Greek epic about Odysseus’s tortuous, adventure-filled journey home after the end of the Trojan war, composed probably between the late eighth and late seventh century BC, is surfacing in our culture right now. Great artworks from the past, ones that are read and reread across centuries, have a way of doing that. You examine them on a particular day, and their intricacies look suddenly singular, different from how they seemed 20 years ago, 50 years ago, yesterday; they offer something new, something that illuminates the world afresh. It is the Odyssey’s moment to catch the light. Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian 

in particolare segnaliamo la nuova traduzione in inglese dell'Odissea di Daniel Mendelsohn, in uscita alla fine di aprile presso Penguin Classics