Exclamation Point!

If you’re a woman who works in a traditionally male-dominated industry, chances are high that you’ve heard some version of this advice: when you finish writing your email, go through and replace all the exclamation points with periods.

This well-intentioned advice is based on three regressive ideas [...] Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study

The CIA’s Creative Writing Group

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.

I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.

She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.

I asked what level the writers in the group were.

She said the group had writers of all levels.

I asked what the speaking fee was.

She said that as far as she knew, there was no speaking fee.

I dwelled a little on this point.

She confirmed that there was no speaking fee.

When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee. But I was told that, in lieu of payment, the writing group would take me out to lunch in the executive dining room afterward. I would also have my picture taken in front of the CIA seal, and I could post that picture anywhere I wanted. Johannes Lichtman, The Paris Review

molto divertente!

Università americane in declino?

How did Harvard Medical School become ensnared in the underground market in human body parts? Brenna Ehrlich, RollingStone

Why, in the last 10 years, have elite colleges in particular become sites of such relentless ideological confrontation? Len Gutkin, The Chronicle of Higher Education

The rise of the extremely productive researcher: Some researchers publish a new paper every five days, on average. Data trackers suspect not all their manuscripts were produced through honest labour. Gemma Conroy, nature

The books to look out for in 2024

 

 

 

 

David Shariatmadari and Justine Jordan, The Guardian

What distinguishes war from genocide?

What distinguishes war from genocide? When does state violence tip over from horrific yet legally sanctioned displays of military force into “the crime of all crimes,” according to both international law and the popular imagination?

This question has been much on Omer Bartov’s mind in recent months. A professor at Brown University and a leading historian of the Holocaust, the Israeli-born Bartov has devoted his scholarly career to studying acts of mass murder. Jacob Mikanowski, The Chronicle of Higher Education

buona fine 2023 e buon 2024!

Buon Natale!

One of our editors remarked that your cover looked like an advent calendar, and I thought, that’s what every cover should feel like, the anticipation of what’s going to be inside. How did you come up with the idea of staging a kitchen?

I found the assignment inspiring: nothing too sweet or seasonal, no Santa, nothing too predictable. Drawing scenes from the everyday fascinates me. The isometric perspective had to be there too, so I can put as much as possible into in an illustration. I love to look in every corner of a room and peek through an open door or window. My idea was to look behind the scenes: the preparing and cleaning of the home for guests. The other—annoying—side of the holidays. So I thought showing a kitchen with all the cooking and shopping and setting the table, all this going on at the same time as the owner has to answer the door to receive parcels from the postman, would best illustrate the “Holidays.” Sophia Martineck, illustratrice berlinese, intervistata da Leanne Shapton, The New York Review of Books

auguro a tutti un buon Natale in cucine allegre, calde, disordinate, rumorose e odorose!

Beware the sensitivity read

In addition to the aforementioned hick, hayseed, clodhopper, ridge runner, and towelhead, I was to omit, regardless of context, third world, homeless, white trash, whore, slut, slave, the Blacks, beaners and noble savages. Outlawed were Nazi, minstrel, blackface, homosexuals, boy, skinheads, dead animals, Rooskie, kike, spic, exotic and gumbo. Also Indians (cowboys and), dementia, shame, crazy, insane, ape, goddam moose, make love, fart, hell, goddam, screw up, asshole, along with some stronger expletives. Janet Burroway, Chronicle of Higher Education

la censura in America (ma non si può più veramente dire America) ai nostri giorni.

What Yale Has in Common With Hamas

Higher education, one of the last remaining industries in which the U.S. is still the unquestioned global leader, has proven particularly expert in shielding its favorite deep-pocketed investor from public scrutiny. In a new series of reports, a research consortium organized by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy found that some $2.7 billion in Qatari funding made it to American colleges and universities between 2014 and 2019 without public acknowledgement from the institutions themselves. The universities only divulged these contributions, which also included some $1.2 billion from China and $1.06 billion from Saudi Arabia, through a Department of Education online portal set up in 2019 to track previously unreported foreign funding. Armin Rosen, Tablet

molto inquietante ... e spiegherebbe alcuni comportamenti altrettanto inquietanti

The Greatest Dictionary Collection in the World et al

Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their usage. April White, Atlas Obscura

altro articolo interessante questa settimana:

In the first decade of the 20th century, it was both virtually impossible and virtually unheard of for a Jewish person, irrespective of their individual talents, to be hired for any job at a major American publishing company—even if they were Ivy League graduates, heirs to family fortunes, and had brilliant literary minds. They couldn’t get hired on the editorial staff of a widely circulated American magazine, or be granted a professorship in an English department at a prestigious university, either. But all that started to change in the decades after the 1910s, when Jews entered the industry en masse. In addition to founding many of the today’s largest publishing companies, Jews became so influential throughout the industry that by the 1960s American writers as different as Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Katherine Anne Porter, and Mario Puzo began to complain about a “Jewish literary mafia.” In short, a minority group went from almost complete exclusion to full literary enfranchisement in a matter of decades. Josh Lambert, Public Books

Jews of Discretion

Let me start with an expression I made up in Call Me by Your Name. It refers to Jews who live in an entirely gentile world and who, without concealing their Jewishness, are, nevertheless, reluctant to proclaim it. There is, or so they think, no real imperative to proclaim their religion; they may even live in a world where Christians and Jews are quite secular, may even intermarry, and have grown to tolerate each other. You are not ashamed or fearful to be Jewish but you know better than to stand out when it’s not exactly necessary to do so. You may not tell everyone you are Jewish; at best, you allow some to infer it. After at least 2,000 years of antisemitic persecution, your difference is something you learn instinctively not to say too much about. I called these Jews “Jews of discretion.” Not nervous, not even apprehensive—just discreet. Or to use another word, prudent. André Aciman, Tablet

dal discorso fatto dall'autore il 5 novembre scorso all'University of Virginia in occasione della Conference on Jewish Life in the Diaspora: Sephardic Lives