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)

Death of a Tree

Some years ago I published a book called New York City of Trees. On facing pages of photographs and text, it presented portraits of fifty-five trees in the city’s five boroughs. One was of a Callery pear in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A mid-sized tree covered in white blossoms each spring, glossy green leaves in the summer, and a mass of orange-yellow leaves in the fall, the species is a familiar sight in cities across the US. At the time of my book’s publication it was the second most widely planted species in Manhattan, after the honey locust. [...]

As I noted in my book, one day in 2008 I drove by and the Callery pear was gone. From friends at the Parks Department I learned that it had been cut down at the request of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority as part of the planned extension of the 7 subway line to Hudson Yards, then in development. Three new buildings necessary for the subway would be built on the lot behind the tree. The Parks Department had approved the removal in exchange for a restitution payment of $22,500, which would cover the cost of planting thirty new trees elsewhere in the neighborhood. Benjamin Swett, The New York Review of Books

 

On Boredom

There is evidence to suggest that chronic boredom is becoming more common, and that this uptick has coincided with the rise of smartphones. In a paper published last year, researchers noted that the proportion of students in China and the US who described themselves as bored steadily increased in the years after 2010, during the first decade of smartphone dominance. Why might digital media have this effect? Research has shown that the main reason we pick up our phones or check our socials is to relieve boredom, but that the behaviour actually exacerbates it. One study, for instance, found that people who were bored at work were more likely to use their smartphones – and subsequently feel even more bored. Sophie McBain, The Guardian

further reading: Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi (Pan Macmillan), Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (Penguin), The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman (Vintage)

 

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.

Translation’s Drift

Translations that show the jamming—that are self-evidently translations—may be especially generative. In seeking to be both accurate and majestic, the creators of the King James Bible ended up conjuring all sorts of strange idioms that are now utterly familiar (a thorn in the flesh, know for a certainty, the root of the matter, turn the world upside down). Some theorists of translation even think that there’s an ethical imperative to signal the strain. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

 recensione a due nuovi libri sulla traduzione: The Philosophy of Translation, di Damion Searls (Yale University Press), e Speaking in Tongues, di J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos (Liveright).

 

 

Proust’s Jewish Question

At some point in his later years, Marcel Proust wrote to a friend that he had stopped visiting the graves of his maternal ancestors:

There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.

This enigmatic sentence has been cited by dozens of scholars as evidence of something essential about Proust’s relationship to his Jewishness. But what exactly does it indicate? Does it reveal his desire to sever connections with his family’s Jewish past? Or does it show a nostalgia for Jewish ritual and a regret about the factors—illness, assimilation, the passage of time—that led to its loss? Maurice Samuels, The New York Review of Books

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

The many Machiavellis

Up to a point, to understand him [Machiavelli, n.d.r.] is to understand the Renaissance. But understanding Machiavelli has never been easy. Philosophers as different as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Carl Schmitt, and Antonio Gramsci all claimed him as a predecessor, but each seemed to embrace a different Machiavelli. To Rousseau, he was a republican; to Schmitt, a realist; to Gramsci, a guide for revolutionaries. All agreed, however, that his searching investigations of human agency had launched a new epoch in political thought. Julianne Werlin, The Chronicle of Higher Education

recensione al libro di Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, uscito di recente per University of Chicago Press 

Edmund White

After the news of White’s death, here is a guide to a foundational writer of gay lives and elder statesman of American queer literary fiction. Neil Bartlett, The Guardian

ci piace ricordarlo in questa foto, davanti ai suoi libri