What makes a good comic novel?

Nobody knows what a comic novel is. And once you start discussing it, all the fun runs out. EB White compared it to dissecting a frog (you’re left with innards and a dead frog) but I would compare it to turning all the lights on at a party: everyone looks terrible and you’ve ruined the party. [...] I think they are books that decide something is funny, as Jerry Seinfeld once defined comedy. In Moby-Dick, it’s a coin nailed to a masthead. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, it’s the worst best poem you’ve ever read. And yet we feel we’re getting at something the most solemn narratives aim for: an understanding of the human condition, of grief, of love, of death. All the big stuff. The comic novels I love are books that could just as easily have been tragedies. It is simply that the author has decided it’s funny. Andrew Sean Greer, The Guardian

How Brown University is navigating the rise of generative AI use in the classroom

Among its key findings, the report revealed that while most students report using generative AI in the course of their studies, many of those same students worry that it is negatively affecting their long-term cognition. Faculty members shared these concerns, and while many faculty have begun using AI in some capacity in teaching or research, many course syllabi do not adequately establish clear expectations or limitations on AI use. News from Brown

intervista interessante, in particolare per gli insegnanti 

Art Spiegelman

He is 78 years old, slight and scruffy-looking, with a grizzled goatee and wispy grey hair, and he can still talk faster than most people can think. He offers me a coffee when I arrive at his home on a sweltering June day, but then keeps getting distracted from making it by his own anecdotes. He takes me on an impromptu tour, showing me the living room that held Mouly’s huge, 1,000lb Multilith printing press, until they had a toddler and it became too dangerous to keep. There is a mural painted by the cartoonist Gary Panter on the living room wall, and another just above their bed, painted to replace a set of bookshelves that collapsed onto the couple when they were asleep, breaking Mouly’s nose and prompting a big book clear out. “Is this book worth dying for?” Spiegelman says they asked of themselves, a more hardcore alternative to Swedish death cleaning, but even so there are full bookshelves in every room, and pieces of art and curios everywhere. Sophie McBain, The Guardian

a settembre uscirà una nuova edizione di In the Shadow of No Towers di Art Spiegelman presso Penguin