u/gipi_perry

I recently read Virginia Woolf’s essay on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and what struck me most was not the Brontës, but this passage:

“The characters of a Jane Austen or of a Tolstoi have a million facets compared with these. They live and are complex by means of their effect upon many different people who serve to mirror them in the round. They move hither and thither whether their creators watch them or not, and the world in which they live seems to us an independent world which we can visit, now that they have created it, by ourselves.”

This feels completely true to me. Maybe this is why Austen and Tolstoy remain so loved and captivating: their characters are never just one fixed thing. They are reflected through many people, situations, misunderstandings, and social relations.

A person, in their novels, is not a segment, but something like a multicolored, multiform, curved mirror. No single view exhausts them.

Do you agree with Woolf? Is this one reason their characters feel so vivid and alive?

I’m fascinated by the Brontë sisters — their lives, personalities, family dynamics, and the world they lived in.

I’ve heard Juliet Barker’s The Brontës is one of the most definitive, well-researched biographies. For someone who wants a serious historical account based on good sources, is Barker the best place to start? Or would you recommend a different book first?

https://preview.redd.it/7zwjbzwltf2h1.png?width=958&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b501d26c41944de8f461794690c217b4ee03960

Hi everyone,
I think I may have messed up my Zotero library while moving files.

I had Zotero files on another drive/SD card, and I manually copied them into the storage folder of my current Zotero data directory. The folders and files are visible in Finder, and the Zotero data directory also contains zotero.sqlite and some backup files like zotero.sqlite.bak.

However, when I open Zotero, those items/attachments do not appear in the library.

From what I understand now, Zotero does not simply scan the storage folder and import files automatically. The files need to be linked through the Zotero database, probably zotero.sqlite.

So my questions are:

1. Is there any way to make Zotero recognize the files I manually copied into storage?
2. Can I recover the library using zotero.sqlite.bak or another backup file?
3. Is there a safe way to import these files back into Zotero without breaking the library further?
4. Should I move the files out of storage and re-import them normally by dragging them into Zotero?

I attached a screenshot of my Zotero data folder. Any advice on the safest recovery method would be really appreciated.

Thanks!

La rendita da affitti in tante città, soprattutto turistiche e universitarie, è un problema enorme. Interi quartieri vivono sulla pressione economica esercitata su studenti, lavoratori fuori sede, precari, turisti e famiglie costrette a pagare cifre sempre più assurde.

Lo dico da una posizione politica molto chiara: per me questa situazione va letta come un rapporto di classe. L’università si tiene in piedi su due pilastri. Da una parte il lavoro precario, sottopagato e ricattabile di dottorandi, assegnisti, tutor, docenti a contratto, personale tecnico e amministrativo sempre più sotto pressione. Dall’altra tutto l’indotto urbano che gira attorno agli studenti e ai lavoratori universitari: affitti, stanze, spese, trasporti, bar, supermercati, servizi.

Nelle città universitarie c’è poi un punto quasi sempre rimosso dal discorso pubblico: molti soggetti interni al mondo universitario hanno interessi diretti o indiretti nella proprietà urbana. Dirigenti, professori, personale benestante, fondazioni, enti collegati agli atenei, università stesse con patrimoni immobiliari e rapporti stretti con le amministrazioni locali. Tutto questo crea un blocco di interesse molto concreto.

Quando si parla di studentati pubblici, collegi, campus, residenze accessibili, calmieramento degli affitti, edilizia universitaria, il dibattito viene presentato come tecnico o neutrale. In realtà tocca interessi materiali enormi. Più case pubbliche per studenti significano meno dipendenza dal mercato privato. Più residenze accessibili significano meno rendita per chi guadagna sulla scarsità abitativa.

Questa cosa mi fa rabbia perché viene detta pochissimo. La città universitaria viene raccontata come luogo di cultura, mobilità sociale e formazione. Intanto funziona anche come macchina economica che estrae valore da chi studia, lavora, insegna in condizioni precarie, vive in affitto e consuma in città.

Secondo me il punto è questo: la crisi abitativa nelle città universitarie non è un incidente. È una parte del modello. E finché si evita di nominare gli interessi di chi ci guadagna, ogni discorso sugli affitti resta monco.

Hi everyone,
I’m looking for advice for a friend who needs a relatively recent Android smartphone in the €250–300 range, available in Europe.

She is used to Android and would prefer to stay with it. The phone would be her main device because she doesn’t really use a laptop, so she does almost everything from her phone: messaging, social media, Instagram, but especially watching movies, series, YouTube, and long video sessions.

Main priorities:

• Very good battery life
• Good screen for watching videos/films/series
• Solid performance for daily use, not gaming-focused
• Reliable and durable over time
• Preferably a fairly recent release, not something already too old
• Android preferred
• Budget: around €250–300, but slightly flexible if really worth it

Good speakers, decent storage, and long software support would also be nice, but battery and media consumption are the most important things.

What would you recommend in this price range in Europe?
Are there any models to avoid?

Thanks!

Hi everyone,
I’m looking for advice for a friend who needs a relatively recent Android smartphone in the €250–300 range, available in Europe.

She is used to Android and would prefer to stay with it. The phone would be her main device because she doesn’t really use a laptop, so she does almost everything from her phone: messaging, social media, Instagram, but especially watching movies, series, YouTube, and long video sessions.

Main priorities:

• Very good battery life
• Good screen for watching videos/films/series
• Solid performance for daily use, not gaming-focused
• Reliable and durable over time
• Preferably a fairly recent release, not something already too old
• Android preferred
• Budget: around €250–300, but slightly flexible if really worth it

Good speakers, decent storage, and long software support would also be nice, but battery and media consumption are the most important things.

What would you recommend in this price range in Europe?
Are there any models to avoid?

Thanks!

https://preview.redd.it/myryfwrsru1h1.png?width=960&format=png&auto=webp&s=0ca0e2449a07f367a9f9091f03625a6488a617c9

I’ve been thinking about Dylan’s Lay Down Your Weary Tune in relation to Raphael’s painting The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, and I’m not sure whether this comparison has been made before, but it feels strangely fitting.

In Raphael’s painting, Saint Cecilia is surrounded by musical instruments, many of them abandoned or broken at her feet. She looks upward, away from earthly music, toward the divine music of the angels above. The idea seems to be that human music, even sacred music, becomes insufficient when confronted with a higher, heavenly harmony.

That made me think of Dylan’s song. The command to “lay down” the tune feels similar: not a rejection of music, but a surrender of the human song before something larger. In Dylan’s case, the greater music is not necessarily church music or angelic song, but the music of nature: wind, water, sky, night, dawn. The singer’s own voice becomes weary, limited, almost unnecessary, because the world itself is already singing.

So in both works, there is this moment where the musician, or the human artist, has to stop playing. The instrument or voice is laid down because it has encountered a tune beyond itself: divine in Raphael, natural and cosmic in Dylan. Cecilia abandons earthly instruments before the music of heaven; Dylan’s song asks the human tune to rest before the music of the world.

Maybe that’s why Lay Down Your Weary Tune feels so hymn-like to me, even without being exactly religious. It is a song about the end of singing, or the humility of singing, when the singer realizes that the greatest song is already there.

I love Tolstoy deeply, which is why The Kreutzer Sonata left me with a strange sense of disappointment. It is probably the only work of his that I have real problems with.

What I miss here is the openness I usually associate with Tolstoy. In his greatest works, every character seems to exist from within. Even when Tolstoy has strong moral concerns, the world of the novel remains larger than any single idea. In The Kreutzer Sonata, the opposite seems to happen. The story feels shaped by the need to express a thesis, and everything is drawn toward that thesis.

Pozdnyshev is not a flat character. He is vivid, tormented, contradictory, and in the second part, when he tells his personal story rather than theorizing about marriage, sex, and the social habits of the upper classes, he becomes painfully human. There are moments where it is possible to understand him, even to feel some compassion for him.

Still, the text never really opens beyond him. We remain trapped inside his voice, with only a silent listener beside him. His vision is partial, obsessive, and distorted, yet no other perspective is allowed to stand beside it with equal force. The result feels strangely unpolyphonic for Tolstoy.

This is clearest in the treatment of the wife. Tolstoy knew how to give women extraordinary inner depth. Anna Karenina and Natasha Rostova are obvious examples. Here, instead, the wife seems reduced almost entirely to the position of someone subjected to another person’s gaze, judgment, and violence. She is not granted the fullness that Tolstoy was so capable of giving.

For that reason, I find The Kreutzer Sonata powerful, disturbing, and memorable, yet also unusually narrow. It feels less like one of Tolstoy’s worlds and more like a brilliant mind forcing a whole story to serve an idea.

And you?

I love Tolstoy deeply, which is why The Kreutzer Sonata left me with a strange sense of disappointment. It is probably the only work of his that I have real problems with.

What I miss here is the openness I usually associate with Tolstoy. In his greatest works, every character seems to exist from within. Even when Tolstoy has strong moral concerns, the world of the novel remains larger than any single idea. In The Kreutzer Sonata, the opposite seems to happen. The story feels shaped by the need to express a thesis, and everything is drawn toward that thesis.

Pozdnyshev is not a flat character. He is vivid, tormented, contradictory, and in the second part, when he tells his personal story rather than theorizing about marriage, sex, and the social habits of the upper classes, he becomes painfully human. There are moments where it is possible to understand him, even to feel some compassion for him.

Still, the text never really opens beyond him. We remain trapped inside his voice, with only a silent listener beside him. His vision is partial, obsessive, and distorted, yet no other perspective is allowed to stand beside it with equal force. The result feels strangely unpolyphonic for Tolstoy.

This is clearest in the treatment of the wife. Tolstoy knew how to give women extraordinary inner depth. Anna Karenina and Natasha Rostova are obvious examples. Here, instead, the wife seems reduced almost entirely to the position of someone subjected to another person’s gaze, judgment, and violence. She is not granted the fullness that Tolstoy was so capable of giving.

For that reason, I find The Kreutzer Sonata powerful, disturbing, and memorable, yet also unusually narrow. It feels less like one of Tolstoy’s worlds and more like a brilliant mind forcing a whole story to serve an idea.

And you?

Titolo: Contratto universitario da 600€ lordi e richiesta di presenza: “preferirei di no”

Ho da poco finito il dottorato e mi trovo nella classica fase di limbo post-PhD: nessuna posizione stabile, vita lontana dall’università in cui ho studiato/lavorato, e tentativo di capire cosa fare dopo.

Quest’anno ho avuto un piccolo contratto di tutorato con il mio ex dipartimento, per un corso triennale in ambito umanistico. Il compenso è di circa 600 euro lordi complessivi, da novembre a settembre: quindi, nella pratica, una cifra simbolica.

Il lavoro che ho svolto finora è stato interamente da remoto, anche perché non vivo più nella città dell’università. Ho seguito studenti in difficoltà con incontri settimanali online, colloqui individuali, preparazione all’esame, email, chiarimenti, supporto su materiali e metodo di studio. Insomma, tutte quelle attività poco visibili ma molto utili al funzionamento concreto di un corso.

A fine maggio ci sarà una prova scritta in presenza. Mi è stato chiesto, o fatto capire, che dovrei attraversare mezza Italia per essere presente come sorveglianza/assistenza all’esame. Ho detto no.

Non per mancanza di serietà verso gli studenti, né perché non voglia rispettare gli impegni presi. Ma perché un contratto simbolico, gestito finora interamente da remoto, non può diventare all’improvviso un obbligo implicito di disponibilità totale, presenza fisica e lavoro extra non riconosciuto.

La cosa che mi ha colpito è stata la reazione di un docente coinvolto: secondo lui, avendo un contratto, sarei “obbligato” a esserci fisicamente. A me sembra un esempio abbastanza chiaro di come, in ambito universitario, anche contratti minimi e sottopagati vengano spesso caricati di aspettative enormi: flessibilità, gratitudine, disponibilità, senso del dovere, responsabilità verso gli studenti.

Il punto è proprio questo: nessuno dice apertamente “stiamo pagando pochissimo una persona precaria e ci aspettiamo comunque lealtà gratuita”. La richiesta viene invece tradotta in termini più presentabili: professionalità, collegialità, responsabilità, collaborazione.

E così l’università continua a reggersi anche su una massa di lavoro invisibile o sottopagato, svolto da persone che sperano di restare dentro il giro accademico e quindi fanno fatica a mettere limiti.

A volte penso che se i precari dell’università e della cultura iniziassero semplicemente a rispondere come Bartleby — “preferirei di no” — molte istituzioni andrebbero rapidamente in crisi.

Io, questa volta, ho preferito di no.

https://preview.redd.it/mgvvslbt451h1.png?width=220&format=png&auto=webp&s=419d2c5ec507fbb20641ad237fe8dd93b475fa09

Buongiorno, qualcuno ha questa edizione di Stendhal, BUR, e riesce a dirmi di chi è la traduzione?

I recently finished my PhD and I’m now in the usual post-PhD limbo: no stable position, living far away from my former university, trying to understand what comes next.

This year I had a small tutoring contract with my old department in Italy for an undergraduate Contemporary History course. The contract pays around 600 euros gross from November to September, so roughly 50 euros per month. Basically symbolic money.

I helped struggling students with weekly online remedial classes, individual meetings, exam preparation, emails, and all the small forms of support universities quietly depend on. Since I no longer live near the university, I did everything remotely.

At the end of May there’s a written exam, and obviously I’m not traveling across the country to supervise it for a contract like this. The depressing part is that one of the professors involved, someone very publicly progressive and left-wing, immediately complained that because I have a contract I am “obliged” to be there in person.

That reaction says a lot about academia. The moment even a small amount of power becomes available, many people immediately reproduce the same forms of exploitation they criticize in theory. A symbolic contract suddenly turns into a moral obligation to always be available, flexible, grateful, and compliant.

Nobody openly says: “we are underpaying precarious workers and expecting unpaid loyalty.” Instead it gets framed as professionalism, collegiality, or responsibility toward students.

Sometimes I think that if precarious academic and cultural workers simply started saying “I would prefer not to,” like Bartleby, universities would quickly run into crisis. The system survives because so many people accept invisible and underpaid work in the hope of remaining part of academia.

Anyway, I’m still not going.

Hi everyone, sorry for my English. Out of curiosity, I wanted to open a discussion about "classic" books — both the ones you started and eventually dropped, and the ones you somehow managed to finish but had to push through, without really enjoying them. By "classic" I don't mean it in a strict sense — I'm including books that are in some way considered part of the "canon", whatever that might mean, so feel free to interpret it broadly.

Ones I dropped, and why:

• Sartre, La Nausée (Nausea) — I tried twice and found it incredibly tedious both times; I never made it past 20 pages.
• Verga, Storia di una capinera (Sparrow: The Story of a Songbird) — the language is plain enough, so that wasn't the issue. What wore me out was the style itself: a cumulative, repetition-heavy rhetoric of exasperation that ends up overwhelming the story it's supposed to tell. I like epistolary novels — Goethe's Werther and Foscolo's Ortis are favorites of mine — but here the voice swallows the narrative, without enough literary payoff (to my mind) to make up for it.
• Grazia Deledda, Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind) — I found in it a kind of contrived authenticity that I don't care for.
• Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket — honestly I don't remember why I dropped it… I'll definitely give it another go!

Ones I finished, but with effort and without really enjoying them:

• Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye — I just didn't find it that interesting; maybe I came to it too late.

le grandissime puttanate che peter thiel dice sull'anticristo ricordano quelle altrettanto demenziali puttanate che andavano in onda sulla Mediaset nel programma 'Mistero'

Hi everyone,

I’m having a recurring issue with Safari on my Mac. Very often, when I try to open websites, Safari shows this error:

“Safari can’t find the server.”

It happens with different websites, not just one specific site. It also happens both when the NordVPN app is turned on and when it’s turned off, so I’m not sure if the VPN is related.

My internet connection seems to work normally otherwise, and the issue appears randomly.

Has anyone experienced this before? Could it be related to DNS, Safari settings, macOS network settings, or something left behind by the VPN app?

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

stare con qualcuno a lungo termine vuol dire fingere sempre di più e rinunciare alle componenti personali più esuberanti e impulsive per avere in cambio uno spicchio di sicurezza

Hello everyone,

I’ve recently finished my academic career, and my institutional Zotero account will soon be closed. I’m looking for a good macOS alternative for managing references and PDFs.

Ideally, I’d like something:

• Native or at least very Mac-friendly
• Free, if possible
• Or available as a one-time purchase rather than a subscription
• Good for organizing academic papers, PDFs, notes, and citations

I don’t necessarily need advanced collaboration features anymore, but I’d like a clean and reliable app for keeping my personal research library.

What would you recommend?

https://preview.redd.it/bt9f2ojry80h1.png?width=1372&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c5656ee16036470901a891507731251c4e19e7e

Ogni volta che filosofi, intellettuali pubblici ed editorialisti parlano di AI sembra partire la supercazzola: Faust, Prometeo, nichilismo, Tecnica, crisi del senso, fine dell’umano.

Il caso Veltroni è solo la cialtroneria più evidente, ma il problema mi sembra più generale.

Secondo voi c’è qualcosa di utile in queste letture filosofico-culturali dell’AI, o siamo quasi sempre davanti a gente che usa l’AI come pretesto per riciclare categorie già pronte?

Hello everyone,

I am trying to build a serious academic bibliography on the history of the USSR, from the Russian Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union. I am not looking for popular-history recommendations or ideologically polemical works, but for scholarship that would be suitable for graduate-level study or for a rigorous independent research path.

I would be grateful for recommendations of:

• major academic monographs;
• peer-reviewed journal articles;
• edited volumes or important chapters in collective works;
• review essays or journal articles on historiographical debates.

The areas I am especially interested in are:

• the Russian Revolution and the formation of Bolshevik power;
• Civil War, War Communism, and the NEP;
• Stalinism, collectivization, industrialization, the Terror, and Soviet political culture;
• the Gulag and Soviet repression;
• Soviet society, ideology, everyday life, and culture;
• communism and anti-communism, both inside and outside the USSR;
• Khrushchev, Brezhnev, late socialism, stagnation, and reform;
• Gorbachev, perestroika, glasnost, and the collapse of the USSR.

I am particularly interested in works that help map the major historiographical debates: totalitarianism vs. revisionism, post-revisionism, social history, cultural history, the archival turn, Soviet subjectivity, Stalinism and modernity, empire and nationality studies, and interpretations of the Soviet collapse.

If possible, I would especially appreciate recommendations of journal articles or review essays that explain how the field has changed over time, rather than only single-topic studies.

I would also be grateful if you could distinguish between:

1. essential starting points;
2. more specialized works;
3. works that are especially important for understanding historiographical debates.

Thank you very much.

Urss style poster promoting fireflies-energy

https://preview.redd.it/ys7wcj86rxzg1.png?width=1055&format=png&auto=webp&s=a431f7e69e231a2666b7cce9bcdee6fa0af2c519