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Best Books of 2017  http://bookpage.com/features/22037-best-books-2017#.WimbBFWnGUl

Excitonium has a team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign … well … excited!  Professor of Physics Peter Abbamonte and graduate students Anshul Kogar and Mindy Rak, with input from colleagues at Illinois, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Amsterdam, have proven the existence of this enigmatic new form of matter, which has perplexed scientists since it was first theorized almost 50 years ago.  Read the article by Siv Schwink at https://physics.illinois.edu/news/article/24114

Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s optimism about the future of the web is starting to wane in the face of a “nasty storm” of issues including the rollback of net neutrality protections, the proliferation of fake news, propaganda and the web’s increasing polarisation.  The inventor of the world wide web always maintained his creation was a reflection of humanity--the good, the bad and the ugly.  But Berners-Lee’s vision for an “open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries” has been challenged by increasingly powerful digital gatekeepers whose algorithms can be weaponised by master manipulators.  The spread of misinformation and propaganda online has exploded partly because of the way the advertising systems of large digital platforms such as Google or Facebook have been designed to hold people’s attention.  “People are being distorted by very finely trained AIs that figure out how to distract them,” said Berners-Lee.  In some cases, these platforms offer users who create content a cut of advertising revenue.  The financial incentive drove Macedonian teenagers with “no political skin in the game” to generate political clickbait fake news that was distributed on Facebook and funded by revenue from Google’s automated advertising engine AdSense.  “The system is failing.  The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity promote truth and democracy.  So I am concerned,” said Berners-Lee, who in March 2017 called for the regulation of online political advertising to prevent it from being used in “unethical ways”.  Olivia Solon   https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/15/tim-berners-lee-world-wide-web-net-neutrality

For the first time in more than half a century, a series of Christmas cards and booklets that feature poems by Robert Frost, the poet known for his gritty images of rural New England life, are on display at Vermont’s Middlebury College.  Some of the poems were published for the first time in the cards, some were early drafts of works in progress that went on to become Frost staples, while still others had been previously published.  The first card, sent in 1929 by a New York printer without Frost’s permission, included Frost’s poem “Christmas Trees,” a work about a city man visiting the country to buy a Christmas tree:  “He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees / My woods — the young fir balsams like a place / Where houses all are churches and have spires.”  But not all the poems are about Christmas.  In 1934, after Frost teamed up with New York printer Joe Blumenthal, the card included the poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time:”  “Out of the mud two strangers came / And caught me splitting wood in my yard / And one of them put me off my aim / By hailing cheerily ‘Hit them hard!’“  “This is a unique thing for a major poet, to decide to give out Christmas cards every year with a unique poem in it and to send it out to his closest friends,” said Jay Parini, a Middlebury College English professor and a Frost biographer.  Frost had a decades-long affiliation with Middlebury, helping to found the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, one of the most prestigious writers’ conferences in the country.  The chair Frost sat in while writing is also on display at the library, while a modern replica sits in the entrance where people can sit in it.  The cards were part of a cache of “Frostiana” donated to the college in 1961, two years before Frost’s death, said Middlebury College Archivist Danielle Rougeau.  “This form, the combination of poem and form, with beautiful materials and craftsmanship and design, do something to a poem and Frost was aware of that and he thought it was important,” Rougeau said.  Dartmouth College, where Frost studied for a short time, also has a set of Frost’s Christmas cards in its college library.  Wilson Ring  http://www.gazettenet.com/Frost-s-original-Christmas-cards-on-display-14253482

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.” ― William H. Gass, from “A Temple of Texts”  William H. Gass, the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, died Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2017, at his home in University City, Mo.  He was 93.  One of the most acclaimed and influential writers of his generation, Gass was author of the novels “Omensetter’s Luck” (1966), “The Tunnel” (1995) and “Middle C” (2013), as well as the novella “Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife” (1968) and the story collections “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories” (1968), “Cartesian Sonata” (1998) and “Eyes” (2015).  In his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” Gass coined the term “metafiction” to refer to works of imagination that self-consciously reflect their status as such.  “There are metatheorems in mathematics and logic, ethics has its linguistic oversoul, everywhere lingos to converse about lingos are being contrived, and the case is no different in the novel,” Gass explained.  For writers of metafiction, “the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed.”  Gass won the National Book Critics Circle Award an unprecedented three times, for the essay collections “Habitations of the Word” (1978), “Finding a Form” (1996) and “Tests of Time” (2003).  Other books include “Fiction and the Figures of Life” (1971), “On Being Blue” (1976), “The World Within the Word” (1978), “Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation” (1999) and “Life Sentences” (2012).  Liam Ottem  https://source.wustl.edu/2017/12/obituary-william-h-gass-professor-emeritus-93/

Unesco has named the "bird language" of Black Sea villagers in northern Turkey as an endangered part of world heritage in need of urgent protection.  About 10,000 people, mostly in the Canakci district of Giresun Province, use the language--a highly-developed system of whistling--to communicate across long distances in their rugged mountain terrain, Unesco says in a news release announcing its decision.  The language joins the "List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding" because of the impact of social and technological change, Unesco says, singling out the increasing use of mobile phones as a "key threat to its survival".  Turkey's Culture Minister Numan Kurtulmus welcomed the move, tweeting his congratulations to his "fellow Black Sea coast residents who have kept this culture alive".  The bird language is still commonly used in the village of Kuskoy, which translates as "bird village", but 50 years ago it was widespread across the Black Sea regions of Trabzon, Rize, Ordu, Artvin and Bayburt.  In those parts it survives only in a "few words spoken by shepherds", Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News reports.  Kuskoy is making efforts to keep the practice alive through its annual Bird Language Festival, and the head of the Bird Language Cultural Association, Seref Kocek, said local people have welcomed the news "with joy, as a dream come true", Milliyet newspaper reports.  http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-42256155

More than 10,000 books are banned from Texas prisons, but they might not be the ones you think.  Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for fiction, is not allowed.  Neither is Freakonomics, the 2005 bestseller that explained concepts such as cheating at school and parenting techniques using economic theory.  But Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, as well as his On National Socialism and World Relations, are both on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's list of approved books.  Also allowed are two books by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke as well as James Battersby's The Holy Book of Adolf Hitler, described on Amazon.com as "the Bible of neo-Nazism and of esoteric Hitlerism."  Where's Waldo?is banned.  Santa Spectacular is banned.  So is Homer Simpson's Little Book of Laziness and Monty Python's Big Red Book.  A collection of Shakespearean sonnets is banned.  On the approved list?  Satan's Sorcery Volume I by Rev. Caesar 999 and 100 Great Poems of Love and Lust.  https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2017/11/27/texas-prisons-ban-freakonomics-big-book-angels-adolf-hitlers-mein-kampf

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1811  December 13, 2017  On this date in 1769, Dartmouth College was founded by the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, with a royal charter from King George III, on land donated by Royal governor John Wentworth.  On this date in 1928, George Gershwin's An American in Paris was first performed.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_13