Who Gets Guggenheims?

In recent years, the number of awards has stabilized to roughly 170 to 200 fellowships per year. The Guggenheim awards fellowships that fall into four broad categories: the creative arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. Since the 1950s, the foundation has gradually increased its share of funding to the creative arts, with the largest reduction coming from fellowships in the natural sciences. Dominique J. Bake, Christopher T. Bennett, Public Books

un articolo lungo e interessante che mette in evidenza anche la diminuzione dei premi assegnati alle Humanities. 

Thinking in the Margins

During our time together, I never saw Oliver annotating a book, and he never spoke about the habit; I don’t think he gave it a second thought. This was just the kind of reader he was: He would spontaneously jot down his reactions, his inner thoughts, in the margins—left, right, bottom, top—or on the endpapers or title pages, often using colored felt pens (red, green, purple, blue), sometimes switching colors on the same page. Oliver’s annotated books began piling up in tower after tower on the floor; ultimately, I found around 500 of them. I felt like I had uncovered a beautiful secret; I knew that I must be the first person (other than Oliver himself) to be reading these long-forgotten thoughts and ideas. Sometimes a book was filled with annotations, cover to cover, and sometimes just a few lines prompted him to take pen to page. To my delight, the public and scholars will be able to discover, decipher, and interpret these “secrets,” too: The New York Public Library now holds Oliver’s annotated books as a complement to its extensive Oliver Sacks archive, acquired in 2024. Bill Hayes, The American Scholar

in questo bell'articolo il partner di Oliver Sacks parla dell'abitudine di Sacks di annotare i libri a margine.

Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat

The layoffs followed what New York Times publishing reporter Elizabeth A. Harris called a “difficult year” for nonfiction—a year in which only one of the 10 strongest-selling nonfiction books was a new book: the Kamala Harris campaign memoir 107 Days. “The decline in sales of new nonfiction might reflect a changing information ecosystem,” Elizabeth Harris observed. “People looking for information can now easily turn to chatbots, YouTube, podcasts and other free online sources.” Last December, The Guardian cited NielsenIQ figures indicating a one-year drop of 8.4 percent in nonfiction book sales (twice that of fiction) and quoted a writer who had “heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t ‘Hollywood friendly.’” Paul Elie, New Republic

On Satire

For as long as there has been satire there has been an effort to explain what exactly it is. A vast critical literature chews over matters of definition and classification. But the task has never fallen only to critics and theorists. [...]

For Dan Sperrin in State of Ridicule, the basic definition of satire is unambiguous: satire is political. It “offers interpretations of power,” though its point is never merely interpretive. It wants to intercede in matters of state and government, sometimes in support of the existing regime and frequently in opposition to it. For hundreds of years English satire has been consumed with recurring subjects and problems: the legitimacy of rule, the succession of dynasties, the ambition of prime ministers, the administration of government. Aaron Matz, The New York Review 

il libro di cui si parla è: State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature, di Dan Sperrin (Princeton University Press)