u/gipi_perry

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

Hello, sorry for my English. I’ve just read Bartleby, the Scrivener by Melville, and I was totally captivated by it. It was one of the most engaging reads I’ve had in the last few months.

I’m here to ask whether you know of any lectures, essays, online conferences, seminars, or similar resources that could help me deepen my understanding of it.

Volevo condividere una sensazione che ho riguardo alla mia vita. Sento come se avessi già vissuto il periodo più emozionante e intenso della mia vita, e in particolare un momento specifico, di cui ho un’immagine chiarissima nella mente, anni fa. Sento come se la mia vita, sentimentalmente e in generale, avesse già avuto il suo picco. È una cosa comune anche per voi? Avete esperienze simili?

Buongiorno a tutti e tutte, scrivo qui sperando di avviare un dibattito sul libro di Verga, di cui non sono riuscito a terminare la lettura: mi sono fermato circa a metà [spoiler: quando Nino si confessa a Maria] e non riesco ad andare avanti. È faticoso, ma non per il linguaggio: su quel fronte il libro è piuttosto elementare, con un lessico trasparente e privo di dialettismi o regionalismi marcati, evidentemente perché Verga puntava a un pubblico "italiano", affrontando d'altronde a suo modo un topos letterario, quello della monaca forzata.

Tendenzialmente il romanzo epistolare non è il mio sottogenere preferito, ma apprezzo, anzi adoro, sia il Werther di Goethe sia l'Ortis di Foscolo, che ho letto e riletto con grande piacere. In Capinera, però, è la modalità espressiva a diventare il problema: una scrittura eccessiva, costruita su ripetizioni cumulate per restituire un senso di esasperazione, e forse anche di palpitazione, che supera il mio limite personale di tolleranza. In sostanza, il piano extradiegetico, cioè il codice espressivo e il modo in cui la voce della protagonista si dispiega nelle lettere, finisce per sovrastare il piano diegetico, ovvero la vicenda raccontata e la sua consistenza narrativa. E questo sacrificio del raccontato a vantaggio della retorica della voce non è ripagato, a mio avviso, da una letterarietà all'altezza. Voi che ne pensate?

New Mac user here (MacBook Air 15" M5, 16GB RAM).

Do you actually use antivirus on macOS in 2026, or is the built-in security enough?

Also: do you run occasional manual scans (like with Malwarebytes), or not at all?

My usage is pretty normal (browsing, streaming, light work — no torrents or sketchy downloads).

Curious what people actually do in practice.

Hi,
I'm the only one having problem with the deep research?

https://preview.redd.it/ho6olzvwbkyg1.png?width=1648&format=png&auto=webp&s=403e8699667b094e359849fc40b3dc5192ccd9f1

Hi everyone,
I’m having trouble cleaning my Mac screen properly. Even when I use a microfiber cloth with just a little bit of water, it still leaves a visible haze or streaks on the display.

I’m not using any harsh chemicals, just water and a microfiber cloth, but the screen never looks completely clean. Is there a specific technique or type of cloth I should be using? Could this be related to the coating on the screen?

Any advice would be appreciated!

https://preview.redd.it/8knlh8r4ebyg1.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a8d201e818c3212d082944fbe8096fc31456e3c3

I read an article this summer by John Littlejohn — Sgt. Pepper and the White Album: The Establishment and Dissolution of the Album Form — and it changed how I think about the White Album. Wanted to share in case anyone else finds it interesting.

The usual take leans heavy on the chaos around the sessions: the arguments, Ringo walking out, George Martin pulling back, the four of them working more or less in separate rooms. From there it's a short jump to calling the record fragmented or uneven, a pile of solo tracks under a band name. Littlejohn pushes back. He thinks the in-fighting story gets overweighted, and he wants to focus on what the band did on purpose with the record.

His argument: the White Album is a deliberate answer to Sgt. Pepper. Pepper was meticulously curated. Heavy, layered production, cross-fades between tracks, crowd noise on the opener, the fictional Sgt. Pepper framing, the Peter Blake cover, lyrics printed on the back. They also kept singles away from it — "Penny Lane"/"Strawberry Fields" came out three months before the LP and had already dropped off the charts by release, and the next single came over a month after — so nothing competed with the album as a single statement. Everything was arranged to make you hear it as one piece. Giles Martin compared his father's role on Pepper to an architect with a blueprint.

The White Album undoes most of that. Production is much barer. The sequencing is jarring on purpose — "Helter Skelter" into "Long, Long, Long," "Savoy Truffle" into "Cry Baby Cry." There are sketches that sound half-finished, like "Wild Honey Pie" and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road." "Can You Take Me Back" is buried in side four with no mention on the track listing. "Revolution 1" and "Revolution 9" sit near each other like alternate takes, and you can hear Geoff Emerick calling out the take number at the start of "Revolution 1." The mono and stereo mixes have real differences ("Helter Skelter" ends almost a minute earlier in mono). Littlejohn reads all of this as intentional. The band had the songs, the time, and the control to put together a tighter record. They didn't want one.

The part I keep coming back to is how your position as a listener changes. On Pepper there's a layer between you and the band — the framing device, the polish, the packaging. On the White Album that layer is gone. You hear the rough edges, the false starts, the fragments. Littlejohn argues this gives a sense of being in the studio with them while they're still working things out. The "unfinished" quality is staged, but it works.

The Hamilton cover does the same job. After Pepper's wall of cutout faces, you get a blank white square with embossed lettering and a serial number. The title is just The Beatles. Everything elaborate has been stripped away.

My takeaway: the messiness of the White Album was the point. The band had spent two records — Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour — perfecting a particular kind of album: harmonized, polished, sequenced as a continuous piece. On the next record they wanted to take that apart and let the seams show.

Curious how others hear it. Does this line up for you, or do the personal tensions during the sessions still feel like the bigger factor?

Article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/intelitestud.22.1-2.0078

I’m looking for a free and preferably safe/privacy-respecting macOS app to read PDFs for academic use.

Main things I need:

• Highlighting / underlining text
• Adding notes and annotations
• Good support for long academic papers and books
• Stable and easy to use
• Ideally no account required and no cloud upload by default

I’ve used Preview, but I’m wondering if there are better free options for serious academic reading.

What apps would you recommend?

DOI/PMID/ISBN: 10.1080/23745118.2025.2505197

https://doi.org/10.1080/23745118.2025.2505197

Hi, I’m searching for a copy of this article for academic research on Red-Brownism, post-Soviet politics, Eurasianism, and ideological convergence. I would be very grateful if anyone could help me access it. Thank you in advance.

Morning everyone, sorry for my English. I'm here to talk about my experience as a PhD student, and why, now that I'm finishing it, I'm kinda tired of almost everything about the academic world.

When I started, I was pretty enthusiastic, because for years during my early career I had dreamed of starting a PhD, and so it happened. What over these 4 years brought me to see this experience as negative is, first of all, the irrational logic we can label as publish or perish. I overworked daily, weekends included, to write, write, and write, and I generally published more than my colleagues (in the humanities, works are mostly individual, not collective), with one of my tutors continuously pushing me to do so. What gets sacrificed is part of my private life, and that's something I was ready to give up, but most importantly the possibility to investigate, read, and expand my knowledge beyond my specific point of view and my research topics. It's a way of doing a PhD that has the terrible consequence of impoverishing curiosity and the engagement with other themes, other works, and so on.

Linked to this problem, the second one: participation in seminars and other events that I rarely found useful or rewarding. They were mostly, or so I perceived them, a way for academic circles to spend money, funding, etc., without a real will to foster scientific exchange. I perceived the same kind of logic in the publication of books and journals, where amounts of money that could have been used for more useful purposes, and I have the suspicion that some of that money somehow ended up in the pockets of the academic higher-ups.

What makes everything more unbearable for me personally is the objective difficulty of using this experience to find a job. I know I made bad choices compared to other people who used their PhD years to attend archival schools, library schools, and generally diversify their skills, maybe sacrificing thesis work, but with greater foresight.

I think I've done a good job in the end, but I'm not satisfied at all, and I wanted to know if there's anyone with a similar experience and similar feelings about the academic world.