Is Careerism Ruining College?

The fundamental questions: Have the scales of academia—weighed down by soaring tuition and the expensive real world that awaits Gen Z college grads—tipped too far toward pre-professionalism, a term for careerism on steroids? And are students too focused on getting into the right campus clubs and nabbing the perfect internships to reap the advantages of a diverse, liberal-arts education? 

For Sangeeta Bhatia ’90, liberal arts and high-level career success are not contradictory concepts—they’re directly related. While Bhatia says her parents told her she could choose from three careers, doctor, engineer, or entrepreneur (she became all three, with a PhD to boot), she feels her coursework in humanities was key to her ultimate success as a biomedical entrepreneur.  [...]

“I describe the process of invention as a bit like writing a song,” Bhatia says. “You start in one direction and make it up as you go. You form collabs with others. You riff. Creating something out of nothing and imagining the future requires inspiration—and to be inspired, students need to be exposed to as much outside of their field as in it.” Will Bunch, Brown Alumni Magazine

leggi anche The Gender Q, sempre sul Brown Alumni Magazine, 

 

How Indo-European languages went global

How did the language you’re reading this in come to exist? The Indo-European family of languages covers most of Europe, the Iranian plateau, northern India and parts of Asia. Its members are spoken by almost half of all living people, and they all stem from a common source. English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Norse and many others (more than 400 still exist) can all be traced back to this starting point: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Laura Spinney’s new book tells the story of how a language that may initially have been spoken as a kind of lingua franca by only a few dozen people evolved into the mother tongues of billions. Henry Oliver, The Guardian

il libro di cui si parla è Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global di Laura Spinney pubblicato da William Collins

Epic win: why the Odyssey is having a moment

We live in an Odyssey time. The Greek epic about Odysseus’s tortuous, adventure-filled journey home after the end of the Trojan war, composed probably between the late eighth and late seventh century BC, is surfacing in our culture right now. Great artworks from the past, ones that are read and reread across centuries, have a way of doing that. You examine them on a particular day, and their intricacies look suddenly singular, different from how they seemed 20 years ago, 50 years ago, yesterday; they offer something new, something that illuminates the world afresh. It is the Odyssey’s moment to catch the light. Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian 

in particolare segnaliamo la nuova traduzione in inglese dell'Odissea di Daniel Mendelsohn, in uscita alla fine di aprile presso Penguin Classics

Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168

Executive Order 14168, issued on 20 January, is titled ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’. In the book I published last year, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I noted that the campaign against ‘gender ideology’ was very late to gain ground in the US. The term itself was coined by the Vatican back in the 1990s. It was circulated in Latin America by both Catholic and evangelical churches (thus helping to mend a rift between them), and taken up by the World Congress of Families, especially in 2017, when Trump representatives were in attendance. It was an incendiary topic in presidential campaigns in Costa Rica, Uganda, South Korea, Taiwan, France, Italy, Argentina and Brazil, to name a few, though the US press hardly noticed. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán effectively allied with the Russian Orthodox Church in condemning ‘gender ideology’; in turn, Putin declared his fidelity to J.K. Rowling’s critique of trans rights, asserting that the ‘gender freedoms’ associated with ‘the West’ were a threat to Russia’s spiritual essence and national security. The last two popes have both taken a position against gender ideology; Pope Francis, despite his occasional progressivism, has accelerated the discourse, insisting that gender is a threat to men and women, to civilisation, the family and the natural order of human relations. Judith Butler, lrb

Judith Butler è una filosofa americana, insegna a Berkeley.

George Orwell and me

Richard Blair didn’t have the easiest start in life. At three weeks old, he was adopted. Nine months later, his adoptive mother, Eileen, died at 39, after an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic she was given for a hysterectomy. Family and friends expected Blair’s father, Eric, to un-adopt him. Fortunately, Eric, better known as George Orwell, was an unusually hands-on dad for the 1940s.

Orwell and Eileen had wanted children for years, but he was sterile and it is likely that she was infertile as a result of uterine cancer. Having finally agreed to adopt after their struggle, Orwell was not going to give up on his son. “The thing he wanted most in life was to have children,” says Blair. “And now I was his family.” Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian

il figlio adottivo di George Orwell parla del suo avventuroso e fragile padre

Buone Pasque

 

Buone Pasque!

The CIA Book Club

In, I think, November 1978, I got a call from a rather grand British journalist who’d heard that I was about to go to Moscow. “A Russian friend of mine would dearly like the latest volume of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. I don’t suppose you’d smuggle it in for him?” I did, of course, disguising it rather feebly by wrapping it in the dust jacket of the most boring book I owned: Lebanon, A Country in Transition. A customs official at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport flicked through it briefly, but even though the text was in Russian he didn’t spot what it was about. Two nights later, near the entrance to Gorky Park, I handed over the book to a shifty character who seemed to be a supplier of forbidden goods to the dissident community. He gave me a small 18th-century icon in exchange for it. 

It’s only now, all these years later, that I’ve realised I was almost certainly a rather naive mule for a CIA scheme to smuggle subversive books through the iron curtain. John Simpson, The Guardian

recensione a: The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War, Charlie English (William Collins), l'affascinante storia di come la CIA faceva passare libri clandestini oltre la Cortina di Ferro.

Dante’s divine autofiction

Dante’s Commedia (or Divine Comedy, written in the opening decades of the 14th century) is already a heavily and explicitly political text, in which the poet at times exhibits a positively Trumpian relish in imagining the defeat and torment of his enemies. But its long-term reception is about a great deal more than politics. Rowan Williams, The New Statesman

che Dante continui a essere letto e discusso non solo dai dantisti ci fa molto piacere. L'articolo di Williams parla del recentemente uscito: Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, di Joseph Luzzi (Princeton University Press)

There’s a Word for That

Kummerspeck: a German word for weight that one puts on due to stress eating. Age-otori: a Japanese word for the particular way one sometimes looks worse after a haircut. Shemomedjamo: a Georgian word meaning “to accidentally eat the whole thing.” Tingo: a Rapa Nui word meaning “to eventually steal all of your neighbor’s possessions by borrowing and never returning them.” Aspaldiko: Basque. The joy that comes from catching up with someone you haven’t seen for a long time. Mondegreen: English, coined in the twentieth century to describe the mistaken lyrics one habitually attributes to a misheard song (and which one sometimes prefers to the real lyrics).

Lists like this are easy to find. The internet is full of them because—regardless of their factual accuracy—people love learning that other languages name things that they didn’t know had names, or distinguish things they had never distinguished before, or connect things they never saw as connected. The lists bear witness to the fact that there is a small but profound joy in discovering new words for our experiences. James D. Reich, Boston Review

questo articolo interessante si riferisce al libro pubblicato nel 2022: Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India, di Maria Heim (Princeton University Press)

Comunicare

There’s no time like the present to revisit the warning of forgotten media theorist Harold Innis: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.” Nicholas Carr, The New Atlantis

questo il sottotitolo di un bell'articolo dal titolo "The Tyrrany of Now". Forse è più facile comunicare con gli animali o con le piante. Da leggere anche questo articolo "A Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter", di Sally Adee, Noema. Eccone l'incipit:

From a snarl of roots that grip dry, shallow soil, the knobbly trunk of an ancient olive tree twisted into a surprisingly lush crown of dense, silvery-green leaves. Far above, the retrofuturistic pattern of a geodesic dome framed the blue sky outside. Dan Ryan considered the tree: “It’s probably close to 1,800 years old.” When it was still a shoot, the Roman Empire was at the height of its influence. Ptolemy was drawing epicycles in a doomed effort to model the paths of the planets and the sun as they revolved around the Earth. For nearly two millennia, this tree managed to evade death by drought or predation or pestilence, forging alliances with alien species in the soil below and the air above.