The biggest books of the autumn

Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… The Guardian

Using AI in the classroom

This July, Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University, started a new role on campus as the University’s first associate provost for artificial intelligence. Littman’s charge includes supporting AI-related research, expanding opportunities for students to engage with AI across a diverse array of disciplines and advising operational units on AI use and working with external entities to maximize the impact of Brown's AI research.

Q: What about AI in research? What kinds of things are you thinking about there?

There are two broad categories here. There's research on AI specifically — how to make it work better, how to use it responsibly, etc. Then there's research that’s not on AI per se, but that AI can help to support. Brown University

e molto altro, un articolo interessante! 

The Banality of Kindness

In the summer of 1944, a young Tony Molho was riding with his mother on a train in Thessaloniki, Greece. Suddenly, two officers in plain clothes boarded and began to ask for everyone’s papers. Molho’s mother, who had recently returned from her escape of Nazi persecution, acted quickly, passing Molho’s little hand to that of a man standing beside them. The train stopped, and she jumped off. 

Such are the stories detailed in Molho’s memoir, Courage and Compassion: A Jewish Boyhood in German-Occupied Greece, released in the U.S. last June. The book, first published in Greek in 2023 under the title The Banality of Kindness, won the Academy of Athens’s Ouranis Prize. Rebecca Goodman, Brown Alumni Magazine

questo memoriale è uscito anche in Italia presso Viella con il titolo La gentilezza degli altri. Un bambino ebreo nella Grecia occupata. Il nome di Tony Molho mi richiama, per omonimia, quello dell’affascinante Renata Molho, che conobbi anni fa: esperta di moda, autrice di un giallo ambientato nella Milano della moda e di una biografia di Armani. La cito volentieri, in ricordo di Armani.

Lumps of Cram

[...] the contingent character of the subject we call English. The very name of the discipline, as Stefan Collini argues, is slippery with ambiguity, ‘an adjective masquerading as a noun’. What is the missing noun to which English refers: literature, language or both? If both, does English belong with the study of other modern languages and literatures? Is its primary concern with literature in English or with the culture of Englishness? Colin Kidd, London Review of Books

recensione a:  Stefan Collini, Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford UP)

Animal Farm turns 80

Every evening, my father would read what he’d written to my mother under heavy blankets in bed. It was the only warm place in the flat. They would discuss the developing story and where it might go next. Lettice Cooper, the novelist and my mother’s Ministry of Food colleague, remembered my mother updating them every morning with the animals’ latest adventures. That my father and mother worked together so closely is no surprise. My father respected my mother’s talents greatly and later told a friend she had helped plan Animal Farm. [...]

But Animal Farm is more than just a satire of the Russian Revolution. This “fairy story” (as my father called it) is an eternal warning against political leaders who hijack potentially noble movements for their own selfish purposes. My father thought all politicians should be watched hawkishly, confronted truthfully (whatever the price) and kicked out when they put their interests before those of their country. Richard Blair, The Guardian 

Richard Blair è l'unico figlio (adottato) di George Orwell 

Brown’s first coed dorm, 1969: More family-style dinners, less sex

It's ten o'clock on a Sunday morning in the Diman House Lounge. The main attraction of the moment is the New York Times. Boys and girls scattered around the room swap sections back and forth and read choice items aloud to each other. A couple sitting on the couch makes a half-hearted stab at the crossword puzzle. A girl curled up in a corner chair with a philosophy text addresses the room at large, "Does anyone know the meaning of the word hylozoism?" No one is sure and one of the boys goes off to consult his dictionary. Brown Alumni Magazine

The Magic of Translation

In fact, as Calleja demonstrates through several fascinating and detailed translations in progress, shepherding a piece of writing from one language into another requires so many minute responses, thought processes and decisions that the translator would find it impossible to suppress their own voice and experiences; and that if they managed it, the result would probably be worse, inert and undynamic. Alex Clark, The Guardian

recensione a Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, Jen Calleja (Prototype) 

anche: this year’s Booker prize longlist looks in new directions 

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