In “The Joy of Sweat,” (Norton) an entertaining and illuminating guide to the necessity and virtues of perspiration, the science journalist Sarah Everts points out that plenty of people pay good money to exude sweat while also paying good money to hide it.
Un lungo articolo sulle newsletters, un nuovo genere che pare sia in crescita. "The newsletter is the ultimate form for a moment in which writers feel pressure to produce a steady stream of advertisements for themselves". Molly Fischer, The Cut
The name of the initiative was Project Cassandra: for the next two years, university researchers would use their expertise to help the German defence ministry predict the future.
The
academics weren’t AI specialists, or scientists, or political analysts.
Instead, the people the colonels had sought out in a stuffy top-floor
room were a small team of literary scholars led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a
professor of comparative literature with wild curls and a penchant for
black roll-necks. Philip Oltermann, The Guardian
Sconfortante analisi del mercato del lavoro a Venezia, "Among the lousy job options for Venetians: serving pizza, selling fake local “artifacts,” and working at the Venice Biennal", Giulio Piovesan, Hyperallergic
Molto interessante questa recente storia dell'asterisco (Claire Cock-Starkey, Hyphens & Hashtags*: *The Stories Behind the Symbols on Our Keyboard, Bodleian Library Publishing), che lo fa risalire ad Aristarco di Samotracia, "Sumerian pictographic writing includes a sign for “star” that looks like a
modern asterisk. These early writings from five thousand years ago are
the first known depiction of an asterisk; however, it seems unlikely
that these pictograms are the forerunner of the symbol we use today.
Palaeographers know that Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 bc) used an asterisk symbol when editing Homer in the second century bc,
because later scholars wrote about him doing so. Physical examples of
Aristarchus’ asterisks have not survived, so we cannot know their
physical shape, but as the word asterisk derives from the Greek asteriskos,
meaning “little star,” an assumption has been made that they resembled a
small star. Aristarchus used the symbols to mark places in Homer’s text
that he was copying where he thought passages were from another source". Claire Cock-Starkey, Lapham's
From the British Library to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, a consortium of libraries and museums have come together in an “unprecedented” effort to raise £15m and save an “astonishingly important” set of literary manuscripts for the nation.
The plans were formed after the announcement last month that the “lost” Honresfield library was to be put up for auction at Sotheby’s this summer. Almost entirely inaccessible since 1939, the library was put together by Victorian industrialists William and Alfred Law at the turn of the 20th century, and is a literary treasure trove that had experts dancing with excitement – and warning that action needed to be taken to prevent it being sold piecemeal to private collectors. Alison Flood, The Guardian
Il controverso caso di Amy Chua, la Tiger Mother, docente di legge a Yale e ora accusata di party scatenati durante il Covid. "The question has arisen, in online comments sections and on Twitter, why
anyone is even talking about Amy Chua. Who cares about a parenting
memoirist’s removal from a law-school teaching roster? The answer is, in
part, because this story manages to touch on seemingly every single
cultural flashpoint of the past few years. Chua’s critics see a story
about #MeToo—because of her husband, but also because Chua supported the
nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, even after he was
accused of sexual assault. Meanwhile, Chua’s defenders see a morality
tale about liberal cancel culture. “What they’ve done to you is
SOP”—standard operating procedure—“for conservative allies but chills me
to the bone nonetheless,” a supporter tweeted at her, earlier this
month. Megyn Kelly
weighed in, tweeting, “Make no mistake: this is retribution for her
support of Brett Kavanaugh, & it is disgusting.” Chua’s allies have
also suggested that anti-Asian bias is involved. “The woke academy
reserves a special vitriol for minority faculty who don’t toe the line
politically,” Niall Ferguson, a historian, tweeted". Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker
E si occupa di Omero, che forse non è mai esistito, "We may not know when Homer was born, but we can say for certain that he ceased to exist in the early nineteen-thirties, when a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, with the seemingly innocuous title “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making.” Parry’s thesis was simple but momentous: “It is my own view, as those who have read my studies on Homeric style know, that the nature of Homeric poetry can be grasped only when one has seen that it is composed in a diction which is oral, and so formulaic, and so traditional.” In other words, the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all". Adam Kirsch, New Yorker
E ancora: What happened to Jan Kerouac, Jack’s forgotten daughter, David Barnett, The Guardian
“This thing—this hyphen—is like a gremlin which sneaks around in the
dark … you should call a special meeting of City Council immediately and
have a surgical operation on it! We won’t be hyphenated by anyone!” Pardis Mahdavi, The Paris Review
Sempre molto interessanti le discussioni sulla punteggiatura!
Anche questa settimana: Blades, poisons, guns, bombs, defenestration, and plump cushions: Et Tu, Brute? Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder, Michael Burleigh (Picador), Jonathan Meades, Literary Review
Ancora sulla cancel culture: "Publishers today are teetering on a tightrope. Which voices should they amplify with a publishing deal – those their staff agree with, or those with an audience who agree with them? How far does an author have to go before their views are deemed unpublishable? What about when the personal views of an author, say JK Rowling, are condemned and staff object to working on her next children’s book? Where to draw the line?" Alison Flood, The Guardian
Dizionari: Victorian attempts to veil the meanings of crude ancient Greek words are
set to be brushed away by a new dictionary 23 years in the making. It
is the first to take a fresh look at the language in almost 200 years
and promises to “spare no blushes” for today’s classics students. The completed Cambridge Greek Lexicon, which is
being published by Cambridge University Press, runs to two volumes and
features around 37,000 Greek words, drawn from 90 authors and set out
across 1,500 pages. Alison Flood, The Guardian
L'università, nonostante la dad ecc. "But for many it has also been a time of self-discovery. Some applied themselves to academics in a way they never would have if offered the familiar buffet of campus amusements. Some bonded with a tight group of friends. Many, like Ms. Alvarado, found that for the first time in their lives, they had been liberated from their carefully planned lives and their focus on getting the approval of others".
Oh yes! The best books about sex. Kate Lister, The Guardian
