Nomi di moda

In America il nome maschile più popolare è Jacob, e detiene questo primato dal 1999. Secondo il database del Social Security Administration il nome femminile più scelto è Isabella. "Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia and an amateur name-ologist, argues that many parents want their boys to seem mature and so pick classic names. William, David, Joseph and James, all longtime stalwarts, remain in the Top 20. With girls, Gelman says, parents are attracted to names that convey youth even into adulthood and choose names that seem to be on the upswing". nytmag.

Intervista a Philip Roth

Un'intervista a Philip Roth è cosa rara, quindi preziosa. Questa, di Jan Dalley (Financial Time) contiene una bella descrizione della casa e della dépendence/studio di Roth in Connecticut, una serie di date della biografia letteraria della scrittore alla fine (sempre utile), e nel corpo dell'articolo molte parole di Dalley e pochi, laconici commenti di Roth. Ma alcuni sono memorabili, come - parlando dei suoi romanzi ambientati a Newark - "I think [in those books] I am presenting America to myself, trying to make the moment come back to life, and remember. And what I don't remember I go back to Newark and look for. I look at old newspapers. I get pleasure from doing that", e poi aggiunge – with a roar of easy laughter – "Well, I have to get some pleasure". ft.

Scrittori e incidenti d'auto

Bill Morris (The Millions) fa un elenco, lungo in modo sconcertante, degli scrittori che sono morti in seguito a un incidente d'auto. Sembra una causa ricorrente di morte per gli scrittori, in effetti anche il nostro Svevo... Nell'elenco c'è T.E. Lawrence, Nathanael West, Margaret Mitchell, Albert Camus, W. G. Sebald e molti altri. themillions.

NYPL

Ho letto un articolo molto interessante sulle innovazioni tecnologiche - nell'Internet information ecosystem come viene chiamato - create e adottate dalla New York Public Library che non solo la stanno facendo crescere (in un periodo in cui le biblioteche, come i giornali, sembrano essere diventate obsolete), ma sono esemplari di come istituzioni culturali pubbliche possano essere da guida nel trovare soluzioni innovative a servire meglio gli utenti. Se solo potesse succedere anche da noi! (dovremmo far leggere questo articolo a Pisapia) "With all this change - not to mention a possible $40 million budget cut looming - it would be no surprise if the library was floundering like the music industry, newspapers, or travel agents. (Hey, man, we all get disintermediated sooner or later.) But that's the wild thing. The library isn't floundering. Rather, it's flourishing, putting out some of the most innovative online projects in the country. On the stuff you can measure - library visitors, website visitors, digital gallery images viewed - the numbers are up across the board compared with five years ago. On the stuff you can't, like conceptual leadership, the NYPL is killing it.

The library clearly has reevaluated its role within the Internet information ecosystem and found a set of new identities. Let's start from here: One, the New York Public Library is a social network with three million active users and two, the New York Public Library is a media outfit". theatlantic.

Le nuove parole dell'OED

Ecco alcune delle nuove parole di giugno dell'Oxford English Dictionary: 

auto-complete n. A software feature that uses text already entered in a given field to predict or generate the characters the user is likely to enter next; familiar to anyone who has used predictive text or search boxes on websites. [First recorded in 1992]

brain candy n. Broadly appealing, undemanding entertainment which is not intellectually stimulating. OED already has eye-candy and ear candy. [1968]

gender reassignment n. The process of a person adopting the physical characteristics of the opposite sex by means of medical procedures such as surgery or hormone treatment. [1969]

to laugh it up at laugh v. Used in imperative (with ironic or sarcastic force) to suggest an impending reversal of fortune: ‘laugh while you can.’ [1971] OED

Reich in America

Negli anni Quaranta e Cinquanta Wilhelm Reich era molto di moda tra gli intellettuali americani. "Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, J.D. Salinger, Paul Goodman, William Burroughs and other bohemian culture heroes were among his followers: examples of what Lionel Trilling unsettlingly called 'the moral urgency, the sense of crisis and the concern with personal salvation that mark the existence of American intellectuals.' Reich won a particular following among intellectuals, artists and cultural spokesmen who were looking for a new revolution after becoming disillusioned with communism" dice Henry Allen in una lunga e istruttiva recensione su un nuovo libro che si occupa dell'argomento, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, di Christopher Turner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). wsj.

Di nuovo sulla noia

Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein - spiritoso scrittore di Chicago - fa un lungo, e assai poco noioso, articolo sulla noia, che è anche un mini-saggio e contiene una discreta bibliografia sull'argomento. Tra i testi citati, il discorso di Joseph Brodsky per il Commencement del 1989 a Dartmouth College. Ai giovani neo laureati Brodsky decide di parlare di noia e dice, "When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom". Epstein continua, "The lesson boredom teaches, according to Brodsky, is that of one's own insignificance, an insignificance brought about by one's own finitude. We are all here a short while, and then - poof! - gone and, sooner or later, usually sooner, forgotten. Boredom 'puts your existence into perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility.' Brodsky advised the students to try 'to stay passionate,' for passion, whatever its object, is the closest thing to a remedy for boredom". commentary.

A proposito di noia; che cosa c'è di meno noioso del pettegolezzo? Joseph Epstein ha appena scritto un saggio sull'argomento dal titolo Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, che uscirà in autunno presso Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Assolutamente da leggere.

Maira Kalman

Di Maira Kalman, illustratrice per bambini e adulti, parla con entusiasmo Cathleen Schine, recensendo una mostra in corso al Jewish Museum di New York a lei dedicata, Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World). Oltre alla mostra, Schine parla di un libro di Kalman, uscito lo scorso autunno presso Penguin Press, e che raccoglie una serie di blog pubblicati dall'artista sul New York Times. Sia il libro che i blog si chiamano And the Pursue of Happiness. Andate a vederli, cliccando qui, sono meravigliosi. "Perhaps Kalman's greatest gift is that her work embodies both the ironic and the earnest at their best, at the place where they come together and create lyrical, personal truth. She is such a magnanimous artist. She invites us, welcomes us, into the most intimate, unprotected place of all: daydreams". nybr.

Erica Jong su sesso e potere

Time ha intervistato Erica Jong sui recenti scandali sessuali che hanno coinvolto uomini di potere. 

It seems like the season of sex scandals lately. Why that might be the case?
I think that there have always been sex scandals. I think that now, people are reporting them more accurately than before. What strikes me about all these so-called scandals is how far we have not come since feminism. I mean, when you look at Anne Sinclair paying a fortune to take care of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, you wonder why on earth a woman with her own profession, with an inherited fortune, would be doing that for a man who's so obviously a sick puppy, and totally narcissistic. What does she get out of the relationship? Is she going to spend her fortune defending this man who everybody in France knew was like a chimpanzee in rut?

...

You've written so much about women enjoying sex, but women don't get into these scandals. Why not?
Well, occasionally women get into sex scandals when you have teachers seducing students and things like that. But I don't think that women make the assumption that men make. The assumption that these men make is that their power will protect them. Women know they won't be protected and that they'll be exposed. And it has to do with how much power men have in society and how little women have. So they don't take these risks, which to men like DSK don't even seem like risks. They feel they will be protected by the establishment because they sit atop the establishment. time.

Scienziate

Tal Rabin

Un gruppo di scienziate affermate (tra cui un'italiana, Elena Aprile, che insegna fisica alla Columbia) parla al New York Times delle difficoltà che ha incontrato nel mondo del lavoro. Curiosamente nessuna di loro consiglierebbe ai figli di fare lo stesso mestiere. E quasi tutte mettono in rilievo la necessità di essere (o diventare) durissime, d'acciaio, anzi di titanio, dice una di loro. Una sola, sostiene che il suo è il mestiere più bello del mondo. E' Tal Rabin, ricercatrice di crittografia all'IBM, di origini israeliane. "I think that the life of a scientist is a fantastic life. I think it is exciting because every day there is something new that you can go and think of. There are challenges, no doubt, and the times when you can’t solve things. So I think it is all a wonderful life. And not to mention even things like time flexibility, traveling around the world, meeting a lot of exciting people. I think that these are fantastic jobs". nyt.