Wielding the Blue Pencil

The editor came late to British publishing. Until well after the end of the Second World War, the man—and it usually was a man—who examined manuscripts sent in by prospective authors, wrote reports on them, and ultimately recommended whether they should be accepted or turned down was known as a “publisher’s reader.” Generally speaking, this functionary’s status was not high. He regularly operated from home or came into the office part-time. There were occasions when he worked simultaneously for several different firms, and in most cases his comments on the material he had to inspect were vestigial in the extreme. Evelyn Waugh’s older brother, Alec, employed by his father’s firm Chapman & Hall in the 1920s, remembered simply scrawling the acronym “NBG” (“No bloody good”) on the title page of anything that seemed conspicuously devoid of merit. D. J. Taylor, Portico

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