Smuggling Literature

During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) coordinated the secret distribution of books to key individuals, libraries, research institutes, cultural organizations, universities, and schools. From mid-1956 through 1991, these “forbidden books” found their way to six Warsaw Pact countries — Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and eventually the Soviet Union.

The CIA’s clandestine book program was little-known to the public until 2003, when a former official of the CIA-founded Free Europe Committee (FEC), John P. C. Matthews, disclosed it in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. The program was later chronicled by Alfred Reisch, who oversaw the Hungarian book distribution project until 1974, in his “Hot Books in the Cold War.” Reisch’s book provides an encyclopedic, scholarly account of the program’s origins, operations, and impact. Henry T. Edmondson III, The MIT Press Reader

Why do people’s pupils dilate when they’re surprised?

“Pupil dilation signals a spike in arousal, and our findings support the idea that these rapid fluctuations in arousal are doing something useful in the brain,” said study author Matt Nassar, an associate professor of neuroscience and of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown. “They’re enabling us to deal with a world that often changes from one context to another context.” Corrie Pikul, News from Brown

What is it that makes books so magical?

Such is the gist of Marriott’s first book, The New Dark Ages, a polemical elegy tracing the rise and fall of print from Montaigne to Mr Beast. The point is modest – scroll less, read more – but the tone is grandiose. Literacy turbocharged our capacity for complex argument, he argues, but adds that “conversation is very far from useless”, and says “literate civilisation … has never produced a work of art with quite the same quality of heroic starkness as the Iliad or Beowulf”. Anthony Cummins, The Guardian

recensione a The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society di James Marriott (Bodley Head);

vedi anche: 

It feels as if we’re increasingly seeing bookshops doubling as coffee shops or wine bars in recent years, as business owners try to broaden their customer base in tough financial times. “Bookshops are the Swiss army knives of retail,” the Bookseller Association managing director Meryl Halls tells me. They are “constantly adding new tools to remain cutting-edge while always staying rooted in books and reading”.

Yet, as Pettegree points out in The Bookshop, this survival instinct has a long precedent: in the 17th century, few shopkeepers would “risk their livelihoods on the exclusive sale of books”, with most offering a range of other goods too – stationery, medical supplies, newspapers – effectively, they were general stores.

 

Twilight of the Dons

Colin Kidd’s intriguing new history of Oxbridge intellectual life, Twilight of the Dons, explains the snub not as a powerful display of academic censure, but as the death throes of a declining cultural force. 

In the 1950s, the academics of Oxford and Cambridge universities enjoyed high prestige, freedom and confidence. They constituted nothing short of a “secular clerisy,” entrusted with the maintenance of civilised values and higher truths, and expected to lead debates within British public life. From hosting college dinners for cabinet ministers to dominating BBC current affairs programming to provisioning the intelligence services with promising students, Oxbridge dons held deep reservoirs of social capital and political power. Tristram Hunt, Financial Times

un libro molto interessante per cercare di capire il mondo universitario d'elite di Oxbridge. Il libro viene anche recensito da Fedirico Varese sul Domenicale del Sole 24 Ore del 20/9/2026.

Per rimanere nell'ambito dell'education anglosassone ed europeo in generale, da leggere anche questo articolo, "European education powerhouses rocked by falling scores in global study", Jon Henley, Deborah Cole in Berlin, Angelique Chrisafis in Paris and Miranda Bryant Nordic correspondent, The Guardian