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

Using AI in the classroom

This July, Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University, started a new role on campus as the University’s first associate provost for artificial intelligence. Littman’s charge includes supporting AI-related research, expanding opportunities for students to engage with AI across a diverse array of disciplines and advising operational units on AI use and working with external entities to maximize the impact of Brown's AI research.

Q: What about AI in research? What kinds of things are you thinking about there?

There are two broad categories here. There's research on AI specifically — how to make it work better, how to use it responsibly, etc. Then there's research that’s not on AI per se, but that AI can help to support. Brown University

e molto altro, un articolo interessante! 

The Banality of Kindness

In the summer of 1944, a young Tony Molho was riding with his mother on a train in Thessaloniki, Greece. Suddenly, two officers in plain clothes boarded and began to ask for everyone’s papers. Molho’s mother, who had recently returned from her escape of Nazi persecution, acted quickly, passing Molho’s little hand to that of a man standing beside them. The train stopped, and she jumped off. 

Such are the stories detailed in Molho’s memoir, Courage and Compassion: A Jewish Boyhood in German-Occupied Greece, released in the U.S. last June. The book, first published in Greek in 2023 under the title The Banality of Kindness, won the Academy of Athens’s Ouranis Prize. Rebecca Goodman, Brown Alumni Magazine

questo memoriale è uscito anche in Italia presso Viella con il titolo La gentilezza degli altri. Un bambino ebreo nella Grecia occupata. Il nome di Tony Molho mi richiama, per omonimia, quello dell’affascinante Renata Molho, che conobbi anni fa: esperta di moda, autrice di un giallo ambientato nella Milano della moda e di una biografia di Armani. La cito volentieri, in ricordo di Armani.

Lumps of Cram

[...] the contingent character of the subject we call English. The very name of the discipline, as Stefan Collini argues, is slippery with ambiguity, ‘an adjective masquerading as a noun’. What is the missing noun to which English refers: literature, language or both? If both, does English belong with the study of other modern languages and literatures? Is its primary concern with literature in English or with the culture of Englishness? Colin Kidd, London Review of Books

recensione a:  Stefan Collini, Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford UP)