“The conversation among the panelists, which took place by video conference on Jan. 3, has been edited and condensed for clarity, with some material reordered or added from follow-up interviews.”
“I did not look forward to my visit to Utah Valley University in the fall of 2023… I had been invited to lecture to students in the philosophy course that is required of all undergraduates at this huge (more than 43,000 students), open-enrollment public university… How wrong, in retrospect, my reluctance was. In Orem, Utah, […]
“Yes.”
“Harvard’s president, Dr. Claudine Gay, is accused of lifting words, phrases and sentences from other sources without proper attribution. Most, if not all, of the examples below are written in technical and academic jargon, not meant to convey sweeping or original ideas… Here are five examples of Dr. Gay’s work that are under scrutiny, comparing […]
“The prestige disciplines in the humanities— law, economics, government—enjoy broad cultural understanding and appreciation of their social value. They could teach the more niche disciplines—literary studies, philosophy, the arts—how to be more publicly engaged. At the same time, the enterprise of the humanities in general benefits from a wide cultural understanding that these disciplines are […]
“While Whitehead’s own oeuvre represents a veritable catalogue of genres, it also chronicles nearly two hundred years of American history. If we rearrange his novels not by publication date but loosely by their historical settings, we end up following Whitehead from the slave narrative and folklore of the nineteenth century (The Underground Railroad and John […]
“Earnings: Humanities graduates’ earnings are substantially higher than those of people without a college degree and are often on par with or higher than those of graduates in non-engineering fields. Earnings Disparities: Except in a few northwestern states, humanities majors earn at least 40 percent more than people with only a high school degree. Unemployment: […]
“Since 2022, nearly 15,000 students and hundreds of teachers in more than 40 states have helped pilot AP African American Studies. (The course will be available nationally in the 2024-25 school year.) College Board visited some of them, in Baltimore, Houston, and Baton Rouge, to see the course in action—and to hear directly from those […]
“The United States is experiencing two major forms of democratic erosion in its governing institutions: election manipulation and executive overreach.”
“What we know – from both research and practice – is that polarization in educational spaces keeps people from really engaging with topics that are meaningful and issues that are contentious in an even, open-minded, and informed way. It hinders their ability to develop fully informed and nuanced opinions and consider other people’s perspectives… We […]
“The United States, in this account, was a picture of a successful democracy until relatively recently. It was tested by the Civil War and the Second World War but survived both. Indeed, one crucial way in which democracies “scale up” is through warfare: no ideal of common citizenship is as pointed as comradeship in combat. […]
“In the second half of this post, I go into detail about what exactly I mean by “simulating history.” I am under no illusions that these simulations are accurate: they are littered with confidently-stated falsehoods and hallucinations. Sometimes, though, hallucinations can be a feature, not a bug.”
“Ukraine is lucky enough to have some of the best land in the world: It’s fertile, with flat plains, sufficient rain, rivers for agriculture and silt, and chernozem, the most fertile soil in the world. It’s perfect for trade, with rivers for north-south exchange, flat steppes for east-west trade, and access to the sea for […]
“That Gerwig is thinking about Milton’s radical retelling of the Book of Genesis should come as no surprise.”
“Existing published research almost unanimously suggests that trigger warnings do not mitigate distress… In contrast to the claims of both advocates and critics, we found that trigger warnings did not seem to increase the avoidance of warned-of material… We found that trigger warnings reliably increased anticipatory anxiety about upcoming content, consistent with the concerns of […]
“What draws me to Milton is the language—those gorgeous, labyrinthine, serpentine sentences which unspool across dozens of enjambed lines.”
“Enheduana does not offer clear answers to these questions, and I would not hold her up as a model for good living in difficult times. But her poems fascinate me in part because they describe, with dazzling intensity, a world where change is the norm. These are poems from, and about, unstable times. That is […]
“We have now arrived at a similar crossroads in the science of computing, a crossroads that connects engineering and ethics, where we will again have to choose whether to proceed with the development of a technology whose power and potential we do not yet fully apprehend… It was the raw power and strategic potential of […]
“A written constitution ratified by the people — and subject to amendment by the people — is an American invention. In the 18th century, people who drafted constitutions and commented on constitutionalism came to agree that if such a strange, new and fragile thing as a written constitution were to endure, it would, as time […]
“But human intelligence is as much a product of policies and institutions as it is of genes and individual aptitudes. It’s easier to be smart on a fellowship in the Library of Congress than while working several jobs in a place without a bookstore or even decent Wi-Fi. It doesn’t seem all that controversial to […]
“The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition… … economic growth since 1970 has been simultaneously dazzling and disappointing. […]
“Galaxy: In astronomy, that long, white, luminous track which seems to encompass the heavens like a swath, scarf or girdle, and which is easily perceived in a clear night, especially when the moon does not appear. The Greeks call it Galaxy of Milk on account of its colour and appearance; the Latins, for the same reasons, […]
“If “Cultural Capital” was a sociology of judgment, then “Professing Criticism” is a sociology of criticism, an argument about how, during the twentieth century, the practice evolved from a wide-ranging amateur pursuit, requiring no specialist training or qualifications, into a profession and a discipline housed within the academy.”
“Many Republicans believe most Democrats want to teach a history defined by shameful oppression and white guilt. Many Democrats believe most Republicans want to focus on the white majority and overlook slavery and racism. But we found that both impressions are wrong.”
“Were you outraged during the Trump years and spent hours every day following every little scandal and transgression? For what purpose? After, say, the first dozen or so outrages, did subsequent scandal change your opinion about the man? Did additional information shape new actions, new responses on your part that made a difference in either […]
“The garden of forking paths cannot continue to fork forever, if we are to find meaning there. Multiverses speak to the part of us that wants every option to be open, that wants the journey to go on and on. Of course, no journey really does—and at the end of many multiversal stories the tangle […]
“At the time it debuted, just a few years before America’s bicentennial, it was considered groundbreaking in the way it depicted the Founding Fathers as three dimensional, flawed, and interesting people rather than stereotyped cutouts.”
“Interestingly, the finding was specific to literary fiction as a genre. In fact, the authors found that “early-life reading of narrative fiction that presents more standardized plots and characters, such as romance novels, predict holding a less complex worldview.” …The key to a complex worldview, the authors argue, is not exactly about empathy, as other […]
“What we’ve discovered is that moderated small-group discussion with a prepared agenda of vetted, balanced materials where you get the best arguments on either side on a. Policy proposal, and people are incentivized to listen to each other and take their turns and then have a civil discussion, over a period of time, usually a […]
“The way that realistic conflict functions in democratic life is that it can eliminate exclusions, hone and develop positions for the group, and bring about the change to individuals that makes them suited for living among each other. Excluding conflict from democratic life, then, not only risks giving into authoritarian tendencies to exclude, expel or […]
“McLuhan shared with the Boomers a longing for something better than the imperfect version of truth found in the newspapers and on the TV screens of the 1950s and ’60s. An unforeseen consequence is that, 60 years later, we live in a divided society. Rival tribes, sealed in their own bubbles of information and certainty, […]
“Some humanistic disciplines, like history and philosophy, have long had a foothold in medical education through the fields of social medicine, the history of medicine and biomedical ethics. Penn State’s College of Medicine established the first humanities department within a medical school in 1967. In recent decades, the institutional growth of the medical humanities has accelerated.”
“Although I think Shakespeare’s plays should be curtailed, students shouldn’t totally miss out. Managing a work is something they can be proud of, and it gives them a taste of one of the finest writers in the language. But I’d save it for their senior year, when they have more under their belts.”
“Arendt’s imagined scenario reminds me of a scene in “The Tempest,” where Ariel deceives the shipwrecked crew with a mirage-like banquet on a table before making the banquet vanish. It’s “a quaint device,” as the Folio’s stage directions term it; a trick. But the trick exposes how vulnerable we feel without something in common between […]
“A short film offering a firsthand perspective of the brutality of the pandemic inside a Covid-19 I.C.U.”
“I close my eyes and I say, ‘I am the daughter of Black writers. We are descended from freedom fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.’”
“In this lesson, students learn about the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history and consider her work as part of a tradition of occasional poetry.”
“Students will be able to… Write a reply or response in the spirit of Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb.” Draw connections between the moment in history, the poet’s messages and students’ own lives.”
“Here is why I actually think humanistic inquiry should be defended: because it elevates the human spirit. Nothing is interesting or uninteresting in itself in a pre-given way. What is of interest in studying a humanistic object is not only the object, but the character of the relation that emerges between that object and oneself. What […]
“Headley, a novelist known primarily for her works of fantasy for young adults, is the most recent of the dozens of modern English translators who have taken on the poem, which runs three thousand one hundred and eighty-two lines long.”
“On August 14th, PBS is running an encore national broadcast of the Public Theater’s Much Ado About Nothing from last summer. It features an all-Black cast in New York City’s Central Park doing Shakespeare’s romantic comedy under a Stacey Abrams 2020 banner—starring Danielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman, directed by Kenny Leon. This American resetting radically changes the […]
“Perhaps, then, it is not a bad time to turn to poetry—and particularly to give those children who will have to go to school online in the fall and are driving their parents to the edge some valuable educational successes. Get them to memorize some poems and declaim them, then talk about what they mean.”
“In our first conversation, “Teaching U.S. History in Turbulent Times,” we left off by discussing which primary sources are most effective for conveying empathy and gravitas in history lessons. This leads into another topic that has gripped me lately: how to sufficiently teach about systemic racism and oppression without making this lens the only way students see […]
“When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller.”
“Pop-up cases are short, one-page scenarios based on issues reverberating in the news today. Use one of the cases below to spark discussion and put your students in the shoes of policymakers.”
“Their earlier work showed that cities that adopted interventions early, held them in place longer and layered them together — for instance, closing schools, banning public gatherings and isolating sick residents — were more successful managing the epidemic and reducing fatalities. The new research by Mr. Verner and colleagues adds economic data to that record.”
“How much of their freedom people will want back when the pandemic has peaked is an open question. They show little taste for the enforced solidarity of socialism, but they may happily accept a regime of bio-surveillance for the sake of better protection of their health. Digging ourselves out of the pit will demand more […]
“For both groups, Leroi’s team calculated a value reflecting the rate of evolutionary change. Their analysis showed the rate over time was similar for both groups. He goes so far as to suggest cultural artifacts can be viewed as organisms: They grow, change, and reproduce.”
“The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it. Preliminary data suggest that hiring is at an all-time low. Entire subfields (modernism, Victorian poetry) have essentially ceased to exist. In some years, top-tier departments are failing to place a single student in a tenure-track […]
“The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor rights, the New Deal, civil rights for black Americans, Reagan’s laissez-faire revolution and same-sex marriage all started outside the boundaries of what either party favored. “The most consequential history,” Harris wrote, “is usually not driven by the center.””
“But the team didn’t just look at the relationship between songs and the behaviors that go with them. They also built a discography with actual song recordings, in order to understand if the music itself shared common features. The discography consists of one example of four types of songs—love, healing, lullaby, and dance—from 30 regions […]
“We see it play out every day with the viral spread of misinformation, widening news deserts and the proliferation of fake news. This collapse has much in common with the environmental collapse of the planet that we’re only now beginning to grasp, and its consequences for life as we know it are shaping up to […]
“More than 96 percent of high school students surveyed failed to consider that ties to the fossil fuel industry might affect the credibility of a website about climate change, while more than half believed a grainy video on Facebook that claimed to show ballot stuffing (which was actually shot in Russia) constituted “strong evidence” of […]
“If you are under 30, and you are able to think for yourself right now, God bless you.”
“Time and again, rational calculations prove as faulty as irrational forces prove overwhelming. Pericles, the Athenian leader praised for his ability to plan for all eventualities, dies in the unanticipated plague that strikes the city.”
“Shakespeare is our most famous writer, and the poet John Milton was his most famous younger contemporary. It was, until a few days ago, simply too much to hope that Milton’s own copy of Shakespeare might have survived — and yet the evidence here so far is persuasive. This may be one of the most […]
“Gathering in small groups around folding tables laden with 250-year-old maps, pamphlets, and images, the teachers thought aloud about what the documents could tell their students—and what questions the pages couldn’t answer.”
“I can think of no other writer whose work, and the cult of its consumption—still, surely, in its very first stages—embodies the ideal of writing and reading as a community practice, meant more for the enrichment of a people than for any individual’s private therapy or entertainment… Her writing opens up into other writing, richness […]
“The piece sparked great interest in Bassano’s life and curiosity about women’s literary contributions in Shakespeare’s era, the challenges facing Shakespeare biographers, and feminist themes in the work. It also generated dissent, most notably the argument that the piece did not pay sufficient attention to the scholarly consensus that any case for anyone other than […]
The debate was really about bigger disagreements that transcended party lines: about how to deal with populism and protest, and about whether the United States is a unified entity of citizens or a conglomeration of groups divided by race, class, language and other identities.”
“It is important for humanists to know how machine learning works, not because we all need to use it, but because it will help us understand why the boundary between quantitative and qualitative reasoning is growing fuzzier. In the past, it was broadly right to assume that numbers couldn’t address the interpretive questions at the […]
“Though his oeuvre explores the depths and heights of human existence, here are a few of the major elements curiously absent from the canon of one of the world’s greatest writers… Successful rebellion… Independent women (who stay that way)… Moms… Healthy relationships…”
“Below, five lesson ideas that draw on Times resources to help students navigate the wine-dark seas and discover how the “Odyssey” might speak to their own lives and the world around them.”
We tell [kids] about history and have them read about history but we never let them experience history. They never get to actually “see” the individual people and events and details – students rely on us to describe those things for them.”
“For the past decade, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college… There’s a catch, however. It’s boom time for history at Yale, where it is the third most popular major, and at other élite schools, including Brown, Princeton, and Columbia, where it continues to […]
“Young women aged 13 to 24 are now the biggest consumers of poetry in the UK in a market that has grown by 48% over the past five years to £12.3m, according to UK book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan. But instead of buying works by the dead white men who have dominated the canon for […]
Wexler said when he told his students in 2015 about how many civil rights cold cases had gone unsolved and how many of those files remained redacted, they were upset. The bill the students wrote creates an independent review board of experts to analyze and release government files on civil rights cold cases… Their teacher, […]
The strangeness of Hopkins’s formal innovations, slipping off the bonds of iambic convention, and of his fragile and febrile sensibility, came not piecemeal but all at once, fully developed, in the posthumous 1918 edition of the poems.”
“We suggest different methods teachers can use to easily facilitate these connections. Each method is illustrated with two examples, one from global history and another from United States history, and each ends with a classroom challenge. The goal is to help this kind of thinking become a habit of mind for your students.”
“So, if the most polarized population uses the Internet and social media the least, to suddenly point a finger at technology says more about our anxieties about the rate of technological change than about what has actually happened to us. The fact is that this twenty-two-year-old dynamic of polarization can’t easily be associated with the […]
Often we take for granted that the United States is a democracy, and that democracy is a form of government worth celebrating. This lesson starts there, but then pushes students to reflect on why democracies are worth protecting, what elements are essential to a healthy democracy and how it is that democracies sometimes fail.”
“For Lepore, history is essentially a writing problem: how we know what we know (or think we do), how different forms and genres transmit different kinds of signals, what it might mean to encounter a gap between the evidence and the truth. Her work has confronted the tension between what a reader needs to know […]
These examples illustrate Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?”
“In his legacy as prophetic radical and political pragmatist, in the almost unimaginable bravery of his early journey and the resilience of his later career, in his achievements as a writer, activist, crusader, intellectual, father, and man, the claim that he was the greatest figure that America has ever produced seems hard to challenge.”
“One randomized clinical trial by researchers at the University of Maranhão studied the effect of passive listening to music or poetry on the pain, depression, and hope scores of 65 adult patients hospitalized in a cancer facility. They found that both types of art therapy produced similar improvements in pain intensity and depression scores. Only […]
One of the things that we’re going for… is helping [students] understand that they can mix disciplines—that they can think computationally about texts, that they can apply computer science skills and thinking to other areas of life.”
“And yet, in all these examples, after identifying passages via distant reading techniques, close reading those passages is where the nuanced meaning-making happens. This is a model one increasingly hears to describe the digital humanities: it’s the telescope that helps find where to point the microscope.”
More than a few of this generation’s bright lights found poetry first through performance, or come from communities where “spoken word” and “poetry” are not separate lanes. Other poets have shown a talent for building an audience in less embodied ways.”
“I want them to do all the things: read against the grain, interrogate their own assumptions, and the biggie: think critically about what they read. In the end, however, Eliot’s “sea-girls” must speak for themselves even if it means they’re whispering one thing into the ears of my male students while beckoning the women to […]
“Below is a list of nine books that you can read in addition to (or, we don’t want to tell you not to do you your homework, buuuut…) the canonical texts on your curriculum. And remember, the best part of making your own curriculum is debating and amending it, so have at it in the […]
“As the rest of the media has lost its power as something like a neutral arbiter of reality, Wikipedia’s grip on that center has tightened. In the current conspiracy-obsessed world, where real structural divisions, technological change, and racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts have created deep polarization, Wikipedia’s importance is recognized by (basically) all.”
“The data can’t be pinpointed to a city block—each square on the map represents 250,000 acres of land. But piecing the data together state-by-state can give a general sense of how U.S. land is used.”
“I want to believe Morson and Schapiro and Desai when they posit that the gap between economics and the humanities can be bridged, but my experience in both writing fiction and studying economics leads me to think that they’re wrong. The hedgehog doesn’t want to learn from the fox. The realist novel is a solemn […]
“Over the years since, I’ve often drawn inspiration from Africa’s extraordinary literary tradition. As I prepare for this trip, I wanted to share a list of books that I’d recommend for summer reading, including some from a number of Africa’s best writers and thinkers – each of whom illuminate our world in powerful and unique […]
“Almost since the start of the smartphone era, film and TV producers have been trying to figure out how to capitalize on our new habit of jumping from one screen to the next. At first, many of these efforts felt like tricks. With “skam,” the multi-platform approach feels organic—after all, the characters themselves are constantly […]
“Shakespeare suggests that one of the poet’s most important tasks in an age dominated by science is to survey the full extent of science’s power to shape our minds and souls, and then to turn to the poetic imagination in response.”
“Following last year’s release of Assassin’s Creed Origins, set in Ptolemaic Egypt, the team behind it decided that allowing players to learn more about life in ancient Egypt might make for a pretty cool teaching aid. So they traded in the quests and violence for antiquities and history lessons, and created a mode with a series […]
Name: Jay Gatsby. Age: How old do you want me to be lol”
In reviewing the book before it was published, David Bevington, professor emeritus in the humanities at the University of Chicago and editor of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (7th Edition),” called it “a revelation” for the sheer number of correlations with the plays, eclipsed only by the chronicles of Holinshed and Hall and Plutarch’s […]
I taught some chapters of The Things They Carried alongside The Gangster We Are All Looking For. As I was finally able to teach about the Vietnam War through a Vietnamese family’s eyes, I found my true voice again. And once I found my voice, my students found me.”
After 200 years of expansion, democracy’s growth in the world has stalled. A handful of democracies like Venezuela and Hungary are backsliding into authoritarianism. And even in established Western democracies, voters are losing faith in democratic institutions and norms… Is this all just a blip, or is democracy in real trouble?”
There are marked differences in the ways that oral and literate cultures think about memory, originality, and repetition. In highly literate cultures, there is a tendency to dismiss repetitive or formulaic discourse as cliche; we think of it as boring or lazy writing. In primarily oral cultures, repetition tends to be much more highly valued. […]
“You can use the activities below whether or not your students are participating in the challenge. On their own, they can be an interesting way to end a unit or a semester. But you can also do them, individually or in sequence, to help students generate ideas for the challenge.”
Redistricting has a huge effect on U.S. politics but is greatly misunderstood. This project uncovers what’s really broken, what’s not and whether gerrymandering can (or should) be killed.”
The first poet he quoted, the one he’d memorized as a child and who seemed to him to epitomize the artist who spoke for the value of concentration, was Wordsworth. “‘The World Is Too Much with Us,’ may, for all I know, have been my introduction to the subject of distraction.”
This guide will help you critically evaluate an article, book, chapter, web page, or other publication and determine its suitability for your purposes.”
“The single largest survey of American religious and denominational identity ever conducted. This landmark report is based on a sample of more than 101,000 Americans from all 50 states and includes detailed information about their religious affiliation, denominational ties, political affiliation, and other important demographic attributes.”
Freedom of speech includes the right: To use certain offensive words and phrases to convey political messages… Freedom of speech does not include the right: To incite actions that would harm others.”
They’re a loose collection of people from disparate backgrounds who would never normally interact: bored teenagers, gamers, men’s rights activists, conspiracy theorists and, yes, white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But thanks to the internet, they’re beginning to form a cohesive group identity. And I have the data to prove it… I used Google’s BigQuery tool, which […]
So far, 300 teachers from around the world have formed partnerships with The Moth that allow them to use the curriculum for free and to interact with one another on a just-for-teachers portal. Blei hopes the number of users grows. “We want to create a global community of student storytellers.””
Those of us who teach and study are aware of what these areas of learning provide: the ability to think critically and independently; to tolerate ambiguity; to see both sides of an issue; to look beneath the surface of what we are being told; to appreciate the ways in which language can help us understand […]
Fans of science fiction and fantasy, as well as literary fiction, lean toward a more permissive moral style. Romance and mystery readers, in contrast, tend to abide by a more rigid sense of right and wrong.”
At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen, who were not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home.”
But many people… like their poetry, as the Car Talk guys would say, “unencumbered by the thought process.” There’s a reason there’s no Dead Novelists Society: for poetry, in the public imaginary, is the realm of feeling rather than thinking, and the very epitome of humanistic study. To understand how preposterous and offensive this stipulation […]
“For those with humanistic and artistic life interests, our economic system has almost nothing to offer.”
“We wait. We are bored. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. The confusion is not my invention.”
“The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”