Using AI in the classroom

This July, Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University, started a new role on campus as the University’s first associate provost for artificial intelligence. Littman’s charge includes supporting AI-related research, expanding opportunities for students to engage with AI across a diverse array of disciplines and advising operational units on AI use and working with external entities to maximize the impact of Brown's AI research.

Q: What about AI in research? What kinds of things are you thinking about there?

There are two broad categories here. There's research on AI specifically — how to make it work better, how to use it responsibly, etc. Then there's research that’s not on AI per se, but that AI can help to support. Brown University

e molto altro, un articolo interessante! 

David Kertzer on what it means to have an American pope

Q: When you found out Robert Francis Prevost would become the next pope, what was your reaction?

It was a surprise, for various reasons. The favorites on the betting market were mostly Italian cardinals and one Filipino cardinal. Prevost initially had only a 2% chance of being elected; when the white smoke went up so quickly, his prospects dwindled to two-tenths of a percent. Everyone assumed that, with an election that quick, whoever was chosen couldn’t possibly be a dark horse. Additionally, it’s been taken as an article of faith by everyone in the Vatican that there would never be an American pope. The United States is too politically strong; it was thought that an American pope might be too intimidating. 

Q: How do you think an American “dark horse” gained favor in the conclave?

I believe that behind the scenes, Pope Francis had been promoting Prevost to some extent. A couple of years ago, Francis appointed him to a position within the Roman Curia, where he was responsible for selecting bishops worldwide. That allowed Prevost to get to know the cardinals within the Vatican, something that’s more difficult for cardinals who are based in other countries and continents. Prevost gained experience that Francis never had. He came to understand the power struggles and the politics of the Vatican. Before he was appointed to that position, he had also gained respect as the worldwide head of the Augustinian religious order.

Q: How have Italians reacted to Pope Leo XIV?

I think Italians always hope for an Italian pope — that’s how it was for centuries until recent decades. But judging by what the local newspapers are writing, Italians find the new pope to be likeable, approachable and humane. Some people, especially women, have said he has a “buon viso” — a good face, a friendly face. Jill Kimbal, News from Brown

Kertzer, a professor emeritus of social science, anthropology and Italian studies at Brown University, has spent decades studying and writing about papal history. At the end of the interview he talks about his present research: "I’ve become fascinated by one aspect of what happened when Benito Mussolini created anti-Jewish laws in 1938: Thousands of Jews, in an attempt to escape persecution, rushed to get baptized and have their racial identity changed from Jewish to Aryan — i.e., Catholic. In some cases, that decision literally saved their lives. It’s not something Italians like to think or talk about today.

Q&A with Dr. Michael Silverstein: How social media can impact child health

 

Q: Can you help put the social media phenomenon in context? How does it compare to previous phenomena that were assumed to have negative effects on children’s mental health, such as violent television programs or video games? 

Unlike, say, the video games of yesteryear, social media follows you from school to soccer practice to your friend's house to your house; from the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom. This phenomenon can exist and persist in most physical spaces, as well as in a person’s mental space. Let’s say a classmate is being mean to a student at school. Well, the student can get away from that, at least temporarily, by coming home. But if a classmate is being mean to a student over text or social media, they can’t get away from it, even if they leave school. They will still be confronted or reminded by it whenever they turn on or even look at the computer, the phone or the watch they use to interact with others online. That makes it uniquely powerful in terms of potential mental health effects.  Corrie Pikul, Brown University

Keeping a diary

By 1600 or so in England there’s a play written, Volpone by Ben Jonson, in which two of the characters talk about diaries, and one of them reads the other’s diary out loud on stage. You have that horrible emotionally naked feeling of having your feelings displayed in public, awful, by 1600, and it’s happening on stage. So, by then everyone knows what a diary is in England, but absolutely not the case in Europe. It spreads over the following century or so. John Dickerson, Slate

recensione al libro di Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Faber) che racconta la storia dei diari e di come siano passati a essere semplicemente degli elenchi al diventare racconti di storie personali.

The Defiance of Salman Rushdie

Recalling his first few months in New York, Rushdie told me, “People were scared to be around me. I thought, The only way I can stop that is to behave as if I’m not scared. I have to show them there’s nothing to be scared about.” One night, he went out to dinner with Andrew Wylie, his agent and friend, at Nick & Toni’s, an extravagantly conspicuous restaurant in East Hampton. The painter Eric Fischl stopped by their table and said, “Shouldn’t we all be afraid and leave the restaurant?”

“Well, I’m having dinner,” Rushdie replied. “You can do what you like.” David Remnick, The New Yorker

la prima intervista che Rushdie rilascia dopo l'attacco della scorsa estate

How Toxic Is Masculinity?

Ten years ago, Hanna Rosin’s book, “The End of Men,” argued that feminism had largely achieved its aims, and that it was time to start worrying about the coming obsolescence of men. American women were getting more undergraduate and graduate degrees than American men, and were better placed to flourish in a “feminized” job market that prized communication and flexibility. For the first time in American history, they were outnumbering men in the workplace. “The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” Rosin wrote.The events of the past decade—the rise of Trump, the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—have had a sobering effect on this sort of triumphalism. The general tone of feminist rhetoric has grown distinctly tougher and more cynical. Zoë Heller, The New Yorker

inoltre, un lungo articolo/chiacchierata su e con Ian McEwan, che parla dell'attacco a Salman Rushdie e del suo nuovo libro, Lessons (Vintage).

We had met earlier in the summer to discuss McEwan’s epic new novel, Lessons, in which the fatwa issued against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses in 1989 appears as part of the novel’s far-reaching look at postwar British history. “It was a watershed moment for those of us around Salman,” he says now. For writers, intellectuals and artists in the 70s or 80s, religion wasn’t an issue: “We didn’t even deny religion, it just didn’t come up.” So when the fatwa was decreed, “it was explosive. It cut across the sort of multicultural assumptions we had at the time. People whom we naturally most wanted to defend from racism were burning books in Bradford.” Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

White on White

The book that changed me as a teenager
I was 12 when I read The Catcher in the Rye. That and the movie Rebel Without a Cause, which I saw when I was 15, were the first works of art that spoke to me in my own language. That both were “rebellious” without being political suited a teen in the Eisenhower years. Edmund White. The Guardian

Edmund White parla dei libri della sua vita. Bella la sua libreria. 

Sempre sui libri che generano libri, e sul "white", un'interessante recensione del recente romanzo di Ayşegül Savaş, White on White (Harvill Secker):

A nameless student listens to her landlady’s embittered life story in a spare, oddly enthralling novel indebted to Rachel Cusk’s

Pressed to name the most influential novel of the past decade, you could do worse than Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which laid a blueprint for fashionably decluttered fiction about barely-there narrators wafting through random encounters in unspecified European cities. Anthony Cummins, The Guardian

infine una curiosità:

“Wussies and pussies” – those are the only kinds of people who care about plagiarism, according to Bob Dylan. That was his response to an interviewer who asked him about some rather suspicious similarities between lyrics on his 2001 album Love and Theft (pun intended, perhaps?) and a Japanese true-crime book from the ’90s. Works in progress

 

Fran Lebowitz

One of the leitmotifs in Martin Scosese’s second and most recent documentary about her, Pretend It’s a City, are the shots of a solitary Lebowitz strolling around New York in her distinctive uniform of a long overcoat, Levi’s 501s and loafers, observing everything and detached from it all. So doesn’t she resent that her aversion to technology now makes her so dependent on others? “No, I just think, isn’t it lucky I have friends who have these things and can do them for me?” she says, with the smile of one who has arranged her life exactly as she wants it to be. Hadley Freeman, The Guardian

e anche:

David Grossman’s follow-up to the International Booker-winning A Horse Walks Into a Bar is a Russian doll of a novel, a book of secrets wrapped within secrets. It’s told by Gili, a film-maker, a damaged young woman who has already tried to end her life once. In a narrative that is teasingly digressive, threading back and forward between different time periods, between first- and third-person voices, we slowly learn the tragic story of Gili and her family, the way the brutal legacy of the 20th-century’s violence has written itself into the lives of these decent, wounded people. Alex Preston, The Guardian

 

Pretend It's a City

 

Is there anything more delightful than watching Martin Scorsese enjoy someone? One of the best things about his new documentary series, “Pretend It’s a City,” is getting to see the filmmaker react to his subject, the author and humorist Fran Lebowitz, who is also his good friend. Ten years ago, Scorsese made “Public Speaking,” his first documentary about Lebowitz, which was an ode to a vanishing breed of New York celebrity, as well as a portrait of the city itself. Sitting in a booth at the Waverly Inn, Lebowitz expounded on her various hobbyhorses, including her rejection of technology, her love of talking, and her addiction to smoking. (“The clerk said, ‘Oh, you know, Marlboro Lights, they’re on sale.’ And I thought, Really? Why? . . . They could be a million dollars, I don’t care.”) Now Scorsese and Lebowitz have made a kind of sequel, which comes, in the manner of the hour, as a streaming Netflix series rather than a feature-length film. Naomi Fry, The New Yorker

Intervista a Renata Adler

In occasione dell'uscita di una raccolta di saggi di Renata Adler, After the Tall Timber (New York Review Books), Catherine Lacey intervista la scrittrice.

Yes, but it happens faster and you can get lost. There's always something and we can forget who we were supposed to hate last year.
 
Exactly. What used to be, for me and I think still is, the test of the critic is whether he quotes from the source or not. That's what's fair. I once got a review that said, "She writes so badly that it sets my teeth on edge." And then she quoted stuff. And I thought, Wait a minute. That's the best I can do. If she thinks that's bad, OK. [Laughs] And that's fair. vice.

Sarah Braunstein

Sarah Braunstein è l'autrice del racconto della scorsa settimana sul New Yorker, "All You Have to Do". Dall'intervista di Willing Davidson:

In “All You Have to Do,” your story in this week’s issue, Sid Baumwell is a sixteen-year-old in a small town, who, as he puts it, needs “a grievance.” Why is Sid so perplexed by, and worried about, his own mildness?

I think Sid’s desire to leave this town, to grow up, is quite strong—and yet it’s not matched by his day-to-day affect. Isn’t this the scariest thing for a teen-ager, that brand of cognitive dissonance? A desire to run that’s matched only by a desire to be comfortable? He loves his mom. His mom loves him. How does one grow up, and manage the violence implicit in the act of growing, in the face of such steadiness and equilibrium? It may seem to Sid (and, sometimes, to me) that it’s only hysteria—in the form of grievance, or longing, or pain, or trangression—that motivates one, finally, to change. And by change I mean simply to move beyond the town, to become someone new. To grow up. newyorker.

In Memory of Primo Levi

Eileen Battersby dell'Irish Times racconta il suo incontro con Primo Levi, un anno prima della morte dello scrittore. "So Levi at 66 had asked me if I was Jewish and on hearing no, he smiled and said that the Jewish community had always criticised him for not being Jewish enough. “I see myself as Italian, or at least I did before.” It was obvious what he meant by “before”. irishtimes.

Pane

La storia del New Yorker di questa settimana si intitola "Breadman" ed è di J. Robert Lennon. Intervistato da Cressida Leishon: 

Your story "Breadman,” takes place largely in a bread line, as a man waits to buy some bread for his wife. When did the idea for the story come to you? Did you want to satirize a current obsession with artisanal food?

The idea came to me while I was in line waiting to buy some bread for my wife—or, rather, it really came to me while relating the story of the bread line to my friend Adam in a bar some years later. I suppose that I wanted the story to sneakily present itself as a parody of trendy food, before quietly undermining itself and changing into one about the social mores of small communities, including the smallest of all, marriage. newyorker.

Richard Ford parla del suo nuovo libro

Richard Ford parla del suo nuovo libro, Let Me Be Frank with You (Ecco) con Deborah Treisman. 

Eight years ago, you thought “The Lay of the Land” would be the final book in the Frank Bascombe series. What do you think has made you go back to Frank again (and again)?
A number of forces were acting on me. First, of course, was the force that Thoreau was referring to when he said that a writer is someone with nothing to do who finds something to do. I qualified, as I mostly have for years. Second was that during the promotional tour for my last novel, “Canada,” a surprising number of people who showed up to have books signed said, quite touchingly (to me), that they wished I’d write another Frank Bascombe book. Now, neither of these things ought to compel anybody to write a book, and they probably didn’t. But they affected me.

What did compel me was Hurricane Sandy. My wife, Kristina, and I were in New York when the storm came along, though we didn’t suffer. Afterward, we drove down to the Jersey Shore—the scene of many Bascombe episodes—and I was so affected by the storm’s destruction of human life and expectancy. I drove home that day with sentences skirling in my head—sentences that I recognized as Frank Bascombe sentences. Neruda said of the instigating experience of a piece of imaginative writing, “Something kicked in my soul.” And, although I don’t believe in souls, I do believe in something kicking somewhere that becomes a call to language. That happened to me. And what that kicking was about, I decided, was a curiosity regarding the effects of the storm on peoples’ lives—effects that the broadcast media wouldn’t uncover. And that’s what I set out to do with these four stories. Emerson said that “nature does not like to be observed.” I thought that the imagination—mine, in this case—could perhaps do some observing of what otherwise wouldn’t be noticed. newyorker.

Primum Non Nocere

Deborah Treisman intervista Antonya Nelson sul suo ultimo - bel - racconto per il New Yorker.
 
Your story in this week’s issue, “Primum Non Nocere,” is about the teen-age daughter of a therapist, who is surprised at home by one of her mother’s former patients. Why throw these two characters—the disgruntled “borderline” and the vulnerable adolescent—together? 

The teen-ager, Jewel, is at her own “borderline”—of burgeoning adulthood—and the fact that she’s ready to transform, willingly or not, makes her ripe for exposure. Her transformation is less dramatic than her brother’s was, which also means that it’s more surprising—to her, and probably to her parents. I like the way that psychological extremity can illuminate more “normal” characters by forcing a comparison. How is adolescence a borderline experience? To be poised between worlds, to be “teetering” and vulnerable to forces beyond one’s control? The two characters seem, to me, complementary. newyorker.

Haruki Murakami's "Sherazade"

Sempre belle - molto - le storie di Haruki Murakami, come l'ultima apparsa sul New Yorker e intitolata "Sherazade". Parla di un uomo - Habara - costretto a stare in casa e di una donna che va a trovarlo, fa l'amore con lui e gli racconta delle storie. Sono le storie della donna che l'uomo attende con particolare piacere. 

Deborah Treisman intervista Murakami: We never learn, in the story, why Habara can’t leave the house. Do you know?
Sorry, but I don’t know the exact circumstances that brought about the situation, either. Of course, I have a few ideas about what might be the cause, but I expect my readers do as well. I’m not trying to make a big secret out of it—in fact, I think if you took their hypotheses and mine and stacked them on top of each other you’d have an important form of author-reader communication. Because what’s important isn’t what caused Habara’s situation but, rather, how we ourselves would act in similar circumstances. newyorker.

Leavitt on Leavitt

Leavitt parla di sé e dei libri che legge:

What books are currently on your night stand?

Dorothy L. Sayers’s “Gaudy Night,” Georges Simenon’s “The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien” and Gretchen Rubin’s “Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill.”

Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?

Penelope Fitzgerald. “The Beginning of Spring,” “The Gate of Angels” and “The Blue Flower” are novels I return to again and again, with joy and awe.

Among writers working today, I have the greatest admiration for Norman Rush. I also admire John Weir, who deserves to be far better known than he is. And I was floored by Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. nyt.

Evgeny Morozov

Dato che di solito sono io a tradurre gli articoli di Morozov per il Corriere, ho letto con interesse il profilo di questo giovane e geniale iconoclasta del mondo tecnologico. "Depending on whom you ask, Evgeny Morozov is either the most astute, feared, loathed, or useless writer about digital technology working today. Just 29 years old, from an industrial town in Belarus, he appeared as if out of nowhere in the late aughts, amid the conference-goers and problem solvers working to shape our digital futures, a hostile messenger from a faraway land brashly declaring the age of big ideas and interconnected bliss to be, well, bullshit.
To say that Morozov has gone out of his way to irritate powerful and influential people in the tech world doesn’t quite capture it. Doing so is his primary occupation. In the Morozovian worldview, New York University professor and social-media theorist Clay Shirky is a “consultant-cum-intellectual”; Google’s mission is to “monetize all of the world’s information and make it universally inaccessible and profitable”; and Tim O’Reilly, the Silicon Valley publisher and venture capitalist who coined “Web 2.0,” is an Orwellian “meme hustler” and the main culprit behind “the enduring emptiness of our technology debates.” To millions of viewers, TED talks are inspirational speeches about “ideas worth spreading” in science and technology. To Morozov they are a “sinister” hyping of “ideas no footnotes can support.” columbiajournalismreview.

Daniel Mendelsohn on Criticism

Da un'intervista a Daniel Mendelsohn su come concepisce la critica letteraria:
 
I want to end by asking you about your experience of teaching. Do you think it might be worth teaching undergraduates not only how to write academic essays but also how to write criticism of the kind one finds in magazines and popular journals?

First of all, I think undergraduates should be kept away from Theory at all costs. I don’t think people should be allowed to even hear the word “theory” until they’re doing graduate work—for the very good reason that it’s impossible to theorise about texts before one has deep familiarity with them (not that that stopped anyone in the 1980s when I was in grad school). Undergraduates should be taught to have a clean appreciation of what texts say and how they say them, and learn how to write intelligently and clearly about that. If undergraduates had to have a model of criticism it ought to be popular criticism rather than traditional academic criticism. prospectmagazine.

Find the Bad Guy

"Find the Bad Guy" è il titolo del racconto, bello, di Jeffrey Eugenides, uscito la scorsa settimana sul New Yorker. Ancor più bella, direi, è l'intervista all'autore da parte del suo editor, Cressida Leyshon. Eugenides parla del suo modo di scrivere e dice, tra l'altro, "Houses are important in fiction. “Howard’s End” is maybe the best example, but there are lots of others. Nabokov drew the floor plan to the Samsas’s apartment in his lecture on “The Metamorphosis,” and I’ve always kept that lesson in mind. If you picture a house or an apartment when you’re writing, you can see your characters more clearly. You know where they are, and you move them through a defined space. The reader can sense when a writer isn’t sure about these logistics. If you’re unsure about the room your characters are situated in, some of that fuzziness will get transmitted into the scene itself. You need to have specificity around you, even if you don’t mention one item of that specificity". newyorker.