Lo sostiene lo scrittore canadese Stephen Marche in un articolo sul New York Times Magazine. "Shakespeare described the terrifying beauty of the adolescent so early in its development, and so definitively and so thoroughly, that it is only slightly an exaggeration to say that he invented teenagers as we know them today. Romeo and Juliet, his extended study of the humiliations and glories of adolescence, is the biggest hit of all time and, unlike most of Shakespeare's works, it has never slipped out of fashion. It has been adapted across genres and eras, into operas and ballets and musicals". nytmag.
Last week, the Oxford English Dictionary announced its latest update, which along with the initialisms "LOL" and "OMG," included the admittedly eye-catching ♥ (v. to heart), as in, "I ♥ NY." (Or, to take a less popular example, "I ♥ Buffalo.") ♥ is the dictionary's first graphic symbol, and as the publisher notes, "may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper-stickers." Per saperne di più e conoscere l'elenco dei nuovi termini inclusi nel dizionario cliccare qui.
Dan Gardner, Future Babble. Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better (Dutton). "Gardner, a Canadian journalist and author of The Science of Fear, takes as his starting point the work of Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning in the 1980s, Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps". Una divertente recensione da parte di Kathryn Schulz, un'altra esperta di wrongology, autrice di Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. nytbr. Da leggere anche la sua intervista su un blog del nyt.
Secondo una nota del D.S.O. del D.A.R.P.A. del D.O.D. (Defense Sciences Office della Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency del U.S. Department of Defense), l'intelligence si sta interessando alla letteratura (grande!). Lo scorso mese il D.A.R.P.A. ha invitato critici letterari, antropologi, sociologi, psicologi, e altri studiosi dell'area umanistica al Boar's Head Inn di Charlottesville, Virginia, per rispondere alla domanda: "What is a story?" Il progetto si chiama "Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies" (STORyNET) e lo scopo è quello di capire il processo biologico e letterario che sta dietro alla narrazione di storie e che potrebbe avere rilevanza ai fini della sicurezza. FedBizOpps.
Henry James condemned it a century ago as a "primal topographic curse." Rem Koolhaas, the architect and urbanist, countered that its two-dimensional form created "undreamed-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy." More recently, two historians described its map, regardless of its flaws, as "the single most important document in New York City's development." ... The grid certified by the city's street commissioners on March 22, 1811, spurred development by establishing seven miles of regular, predictable street access. It also laid the groundwork for nearly 2,000 acres of landfill that would be added to the island over the next two centuries. The commissioners concluded that New York "is to be composed principally of the habitations of men, and that straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in." nyt.
Publishers Weekly ha lanciato un'iniziativa interessante: una serie di interviste a recensori sullo "stato della recensione". La prima a essere intervistata è Laura Miller di Salon. Ecco quel che dice, fra l'altro, "Your primary responsibility is to the reader. My friend Lev Grossman, the Time magazine book critic, has a motto that sums it up: Don’t lie. ... It's bad when an author gets a bad review he or she doesn't deserve, but it's bad for the overall ecology of book reviews, if a reviewer gives a book an unduly positive review. It establishes a climate of bad faith. This is something that has already happened; there's a feeling in the public that reviewers try to sell them on authors that aren't that good. That's one reason that professional reviews are becoming extinct: people don't trust them." Mi sembra quel che stia succedendo (anzi è successo) in Italia. Esiste ancora un recensore di cui fidarsi qui da noi? PW.
 |
| Meghan O'Rourke |
di una persona cara? Recentemente sono usciti due scritti che seguono passo passo la morte di una persona che ci è vicina: Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story, sulla morte del marito Raymond Smith, (uscito presso Ecco a metà di febbraio), e Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye (Riverhead), sulla morte della madre. Il libro di Oates è stato molto recensito. Non ne ho parlato perché ne avevo letto un'anticipazione sul New Yorker e l'avevo trovata poco interessante - meccanica e fredda. Il memoriale di O'Rourke uscirà ad aprile, ma l'anticipazione sul New Yorker mi è parsa molto intensa, commovente e forte (e c'è una bellissima fota della madre della poetessa a cavallo). Le due scrittrici si sono confrontate sull'argomento recentemente sul New York Times. O'Rourke, "As her disease progressed, I found myself writing down all the experiences we had - the day she got giddily high on morphine at the doctor's office; the afternoon we talked, painfully, about her upcoming death. It helped me externalize what was happening. After she died, I kept writing - and reading - trying to understand or just get a handle on grief, which was different from what I thought it'd be. It wasn't merely sadness; I was full of nostalgia for my childhood, obsessed with my dream life and had a hard time sleeping or focusing on anything but my memories." nyt,
Assisterati: For six weeks, at a cost of $7,000, Columbia University offers recent college graduates forgettable workshops, fleeting encounters with important editors and access to the best unlisted job openings in book publishing and magazines. After swift job placement, these hyper-literate 20-somethings occupy a peculiar professional class: the Assisterati. Their institutional affiliations lend them a sense that they are the caretakers, soon to be inheritors, of a sublime patrimony. Their proximity to literary creation - via email, telephone or fax - suggests they possess a cultural credibility they couldn't acquire in, say, Chicago, or on Wall Street. Underpaid but brimming with hope, they, like the people they assist, will one day run this town and steer the course of American literature. That is, if they stick around with their egos intact. nyobserver.
Umami: è uno dei cinque gusti percepiti, secondo wikipedia. Qui ci serve per introdurre un libro carino, The Flavour Thesaurus, di Niki Segnit (Bloomsbury), "The book lists 99 flavors and common flavor pairings for home cooks, say, combining celery and horseradish or melding tomato and anchovy. Each of the 900 pairings (out of a possible 4,851!) comes with a short digression." goodfood.
You and I: in un articolo molto interessante Robert Lane Greene analizza il significato di questi due pronomi nel mondo dei nuovi media: perché iPad, e YouTube? intelligentlife.
Dan Gardner, Future Babble. Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better (Dutton). "Gardner, a Canadian journalist and author of The Science of Fear, takes as his starting point the work of Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning in the 1980s, Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps". Una divertente recensione da parte di Kathryn Schulz, un'altra esperta di wrongology, autrice di Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. nytbr. Da leggere anche la sua intervista su un blog del nyt.
