In the era of fake news, is April Fools' Day funny anymore?
Malchkeon's idea in action ;-)
Science Suggests Another Reason You Should Be Reading Books
According to research conducted at the University of Toronto, study participants who read short-story fiction experienced far less need for "cognitive closure" compared with counterparts who read nonfiction essays. Essentially, they tested as more open-minded, compared with the readers of essays. "Although nonfiction reading allows students to learn the subject matter, it may not always help them in thinking about it," the authors write. … Read More
The craziest April Fool's Day jokes
JSTOR – [See the article referenced, available to read free online: The Portrayal of Librarians in Obituaries at the End of the Twentieth Century]: “Historically, the New York Times’s pages have been male-dominated, and its obituary section is no different. On International Women’s Day, the paper set out to supplement the record by running obituaries for overlooked women like Charlotte Brontë and Ida B. Wells—and the project will continue in an attempt to amend the record. Back in 2004, Information Studies scholars Juris Dilevko and Lisa Gottlieb wanted to know if those oversights included librarians. They analyzed the New York Times obit section between 1977 and 2002 in an attempt to understand how the obituary section portrayed American librarians. Calling the Times’ obituaries “a genre into themselves,” they wondered how editors decided whom to memorialize and whom to leave behind. Given the paper’s commitment to repute as opposed to celebrity, what might the coverage reveal about librarianship? The team studied 123 obituaries about people who were librarians by training and who had spent the majority of their professional lives working in a library or archive…”
“…Nearly sixty-four percent of the obituaries were about men. Librarianship is a heavily woman-dominated field, with women holding over eighty-five percent of all librarian positions in the U.S. and sixty-four percent of all academic librarian positions…” [h/t Barclay Walsh]
`They Sit Apart, Frowning at the Floor'
On March 28, 1922, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, the novelist’s father, was murdered in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall by Russian monarchists. The former Russian foreign minister, Pavel Milyukov, was delivering a lecture – “America and the Restoration of Russia” -- to a crowd of some 1,500. The event was sponsored by the exiled Constitutional Democratic Party -- the Kadets – formed during the Russian Revolution of 1905. The Kadets are customarily described as “liberal” in the Russian context. They favored an eight-hour work day and Jewish emancipation. After seizing power the Bolsheviks issued an arrest warrant for the senior Nabokov. As a member of the first Duma, in 1906, he had already been deprived of court rank and imprisoned by the Tsarist government.
Two far-right monarchists, Peter Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky, entered the Berlin hall intending to kill Milyukov. One of them fired a revolver at him and shouted, “For the tsar’s family and Russia.” Nabokov leaped from his seat, grabbed the arm of the shooter – Shabelsky-Bork -- and tried to disarm him. Taboritsky shot Nabokov three times, killing him almost instantly. Seven others were wounded but Milyukov remained unharmed.
See Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years(1990) for a more detailed account, including the entry from the future novelist’s diary written on the day of the killing. Boyd says it “prefigures his innovative handling of emotional crisis in his fiction.” It also prefigures the recurrent theme of mistaken murder, as in Pale Fire when the buffoonish Jakob Gradus assassinates John Shade. In Speak, Memory, the loveliest autobiography in the language, Nabokov remembers his father and others among the dead:
“Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then -- not in dreams -- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”
See also, at the end of Chap. 1, his father’s “marvelous case of levitation.”