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

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

Love and sex in the age of apps

There is a scene in Annie Lord’s novel that will be instantly familiar to any young person who has spent time at a pub or nightclub recently. Daisy and Maya, two best friends in their mid-20s, are lamenting the paltry state of the dating market.

“It’s just shit out there,” Daisy says. “Every time we go out there’s, like, one decent single guy and then about 40 gorgeous women with master’s degrees and shag haircuts and what’s even the point in trying.”

“That so fits with my experience … dating is very bleak at the moment,” Lord laughs, when we sit down in an east London cafe. “Something’s got to give!” The 30-year-old writer has built a career out of observing the intracacies and intimacies of modern dating. Emma Loffhagen, The Guardian

il libro di cui si parla è: The Project, Annie Lord (Harvill)

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Reiko Hiroyama lives on Ishigaki, a subtropical island in Japan. One morning, she went out to comb the beach near her house. Beachcombing conjures up a leisurely world of sand dollars and Daiquiris, but Hiroyama’s practice was actually about bringing in the trash. Over the years, she’d retrieved flip-flops, jerricans, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, fishing nets, and a seemingly endless array of bottles—jugs, flasks, milk bottles, beer bottles, water bottles, detergent bottles, baby bottles, motor-oil bottles. Yet that day a turquoise glass bottle caught her eye. Its neck was sticking out of the sand. There was a scroll-like object inside. “The sunlight shining on it gave it a strong presence,” Hiroyama recalled. “It seemed to say, ‘I’m here!’ ”

The cap was so thoroughly rusted that she couldn’t twist it off, so she decided to break the bottle open on a rock. “My heart was pounding,” she said. She extracted the scroll: a sheet of white paper covered in cursive handwriting. Hiroyama’s spirits sank when she realized that the letter was written in French. Lauren Collins, The New Yorker

In love with the hotel

The second winner of the Women’s prize for nonfiction will be unveiled next month. Alongside books of memoir, science and biography, this year’s shortlist features two titles in which hotels are the main character: The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet and Hotel Exile by Jane Rogoyska.

Nonfiction aside, hotels have long been compelling settings for dramas of all kinds: novels (Hotel du Lac, A Gentleman in Moscow), TV (The White Lotus, Fawlty Towers) and film (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Lost in Translation) make use, too. 

Eclipse of Peace

On May 28, 585 B.C., a rare celestial event turned a battlefield into a place of peace. As the armies of King Alyattes II of Lydia and King Cyaxares of the Medes prepared for yet another clash, the midday sun suddenly vanished. Day became night. This unexpected darkness—now known as the Eclipse of Peace—stunned both sides and brought an abrupt halt to the war. Abdul Moeed, Greek Reporter

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.

Neighbors

For as long as we’ve had homes, we’ve had neighbors—which is to say, we’ve had neighbor problems. [...] 

This kind of conflict—heightened, in modern times, by the advent of the doorbell camera and the erosion of the social contract—is the stuff of “Neighbors,” a new documentary series on HBO created by Dylan Redford (grandson of Robert) and Harrison Fishman (ancestry unknown). The show focusses on disputes between homeowners that, in many cases, have evolved into debilitating, years-long feuds. Tyler Foggatt, The New Yorker

Sigmund Freud’s begonia

 

This story started in March. A friend sent me a link to a small British movie she’d worked on that hadn’t yet been released. It had been shot in Wales over 18 days on a tiny budget, and as the closing credits rolled, my tearful husband [Richard Curtis] said he thought it was one of the best British films of all time. We offered to host a screening and invited anyone we knew with media influence to watch the masterpiece that is The Ballad of Wallis Island to help spread the word.

A few weeks later, the co-writer and star of the film, Tom Basden, arrived with a thank-you gift: a plastic pot with a leafy stick in the middle. To be honest, I’d have preferred a scented candle, but I was touched that he’d brought it.

Tom then told me the story of the plant. This scrubby little sprig was a cutting from his begonia, which had started life as a cutting given to him by his father-in-law, the writer Barry Walsh, who had been given his plant as a cutting by the casting director Corinne Rodriguez in 2017. Corinne’s begonia had grown from a cutting of a plant grown from one given to her by the actor Sally Miles in the 1970s. Sally’s had started life as a cutting she was given by the opera singer Kirsten Flagstad in the 50s. And Kirsten had been given her cutting in the 30s by her dear friend … Sigmund Freud.

So there I was, moving from apathy to disbelief, holding the same plant my great-grandfather Sigmund had nurtured nearly 100 years ago. Emma Freud, The Observer

una bella storia! 

How A Woodpecker Pecks Wood

If you’ve heard the hammering of a woodpecker in the woods, you might have wondered how the birds can be so forceful. What does it take to whack your head against a tree repeatedly, hard enough to drill a hole? A team of researchers wondered that too and set out to investigate, by putting tiny muscle monitors on eight downy woodpeckers and recording them with high-speed video as they pecked away in the lab. Science Friday

A team of researchers at Brown has pecked away at the mysterious force of woodpeckers, revealing how the birds combine breathing and whole-body coordination to drill into trees with extraordinary force. “I think one of the most stunning things that we found in this study was that… they’re engaging everything from head and neck muscles, which you might expect, all the way down to muscles in their tail and hips as they push forward during these strikes,” said lead author Nicholas Antonson, a postdoctoral research fellow in ecology, evolution and organismal biology at Brown. 

finiamo l'anno con notizie curiose 

The Hottest Club In Town? The Convent

Before we had hot girl summers and girl dinners, before there were GRWM’s and OOTD’s, and before the days of wellness retreats and GOOP goodies that promise to keep you happy, healthy, and wise, there were convents. While the trappings of modern comforts dominate social media feeds, as influencers galavant on White Lotus-style trips, documenting it all with cinematic precision, another phenomena has slowly been closing its grip on the algorithms, particularly of young women: convent content.

Whether it’s nuns documenting their day to day lives or young women sharing their experiences booking retreats at convents, the increasing popularity of convent begs the question: are nuns the ultimate, the first, and the most enduring lifestyle influencers of them all?

In their new book, Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life, Brown University scholars and best friends Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita seek to answer that and more. Caroline Reilly, Forbes

notate la prosa molto "ivy league" dell'articolo 

 

UNABRIDGED

Journalist Fatsis, author of the kindred book Word Freak, talked his way into the headquarters of Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Massachusetts, after learning that “the company was overhauling its foundational book, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged.” The last major revision had occurred decades earlier, in 1961, totaling some 465,000 words—and, given that speakers of the English language were coining words (“Doomscrolling one year, cheugy another, rizz the next”) far faster than the dictionary could keep up with, there was plenty to do. Kirkus Review

How Sober Should a Writer Be?

Drinking in America has been on the decline. Myriad articles report this, some trendy, some clinical. [...] The first place I noticed this change was in confessional nonfiction. [...] Then I began to notice the same phenomenon in fiction, except in reverse. [...] Refreshingly, onto our sober bar cart lands On Booze, a slim showcase of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most spirited pieces, which will be reissued next month. [...] But there’s nothing quite like binging from the source. For all of Dorothy Parker’s quips about cocktails and Charles Bukowski’s bromides about beer, Fitzgerald’s prose alcohol content remains unparalleled—the irony being that he was a lightweight, forever trying to keep pace with Hemingway. As the critic John Lanchester wrote of him, “If ever there was someone who simply should not have drunk at all, it was Fitzgerald.” The prolific author’s life ended tragically, at forty-four, but damn if he couldn’t make a glamorous time seem regular. Sloane Crosley, The Yale Review

Why Diet Coke From McDonald's Is Just Better

Magical origins aside, I wondered if there was more traditional scholarly support for why McDonald’s Diet Coke is objectively better than others? Cursory internet research reveals that several key factors play into how McDonald’s Diet Coke distinguishes itself, including but not limited to the composition, a top-notch filtration system and temperature control.

When it comes quality, the nuances are in the nitty-gritty. To delve into the finer points of the McDonald’s Diet Coke popularity (and the reasons for this phenomenon) I consulted with scientists, engineers, current and former McDonald’s employees, and one of the world’s leading experts on carbonation, Brown University professor Roberto Zenit.

The conclusion? Every step of the way, McDonald’s goes the extra mile to ensure the best Diet Coke experience. Fundamentally, it comes down to a superior solute (syrup) to solvent (water) mixture to yield the solution (har) that is Diet Coke. Joanna O'Leary, HuffPost

quel che ho sempre amato dell'America è che qualsiasi cosa possa diventare oggetto di studio, anche nelle grandi università.  

Political extremists brains

When people with extreme political views see politically charged content, their brains process the information in the same way — even when their views are at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.

That’s according to a new study led by psychological and cognitive researchers and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research provides psychological evidence for the theory of horseshoe politics, which holds that the views of people at the far left and far right of the political spectrum resemble each other more closely than they do people with moderate views. Corrie Pikul, News from Brown

ah, ah, ah! Lo immaginavo... 

Brown’s first coed dorm, 1969: More family-style dinners, less sex

It's ten o'clock on a Sunday morning in the Diman House Lounge. The main attraction of the moment is the New York Times. Boys and girls scattered around the room swap sections back and forth and read choice items aloud to each other. A couple sitting on the couch makes a half-hearted stab at the crossword puzzle. A girl curled up in a corner chair with a philosophy text addresses the room at large, "Does anyone know the meaning of the word hylozoism?" No one is sure and one of the boys goes off to consult his dictionary. Brown Alumni Magazine

The History of Advice Columns

The word “advice” comes from two Latin words: the prefix ad, which implies a movement toward something, and vīsum, “vision,” a distinctly vivid or imaginative image. To ask for advice is to reach for a person whose vision exceeds yours, for reasons supernatural (oracles, mediums), professional (doctors, lawyers), or pastoral (parents, friends). It is a curious accident of language that “advice” contains within it the etymologically unrelated word “vice,” from the Latin vitium, meaning “fault” or “sin.” Yet the accident is suggestive. [...] 

Mary Beth Norton’s book “ ‘I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer’: Letters on Love & Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column” (Princeton) collects nearly three hundred specimens of the advice that the Athenian Mercury, as it’s usually known, offered. London was at the time Europe’s largest city, a place where crosscurrents of trade, finance, robbery, and prostitution pulled recently urbanized inhabitants into previously unimaginable relationships with strangers. In the age of print, Hamburg was the birthplace of magazine publishing, and Paris the birthplace of the literary review and the gossip rag; but restless, immoral London was where the advice column first transformed people’s private lives into object lessons for ethical behavior. The anonymity of the modern city gave rise to a distinctly modern form. Merve Emre, The New Yorker

Like

Reynolds smartly and lightheartedly shares various scenarios in which she feels using the word “like” in conversation offers an advantage. As she suggests, “like” is a great alternative to “said” when recounting to a friend how an incident made one feel. “And then I was like….” The ability to use “like” in this context “has fundamentally changed the way we tell stories.”As Reynolds explains, when feelings are the focus, “we no longer have to recite (or remember) precisely what was said.” Kirkus Reviews

il libro di Megan C. Reynolds, Like, di cui qui si parla è edito da HarperOne. Notate il sottotitolo! 

interessante anche: Keith Houston, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji (Norton)

Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries

Il titolo completo di questo articolo è "What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now" e il sottotilo, ‘Romantasy’ novels are booming when romance in general is in decline.

Riusciranno elfi sexy, cavalcatori di draghi scatenati e fate vogliose a salvare l’editoria? Il romantasy oggi genera 20 milioni di copie all’anno. Anna Louie Sussman, The Wall Street Journal