Mocking the humanities: a pundit recounts how a scientist used parody — a classic literary mode of expression — to mock  academic practices in the humanities. From the commentary:

Alan Sokal’s point … was that intellectual inquiry in the humanities often is not open. The humanities, he today tells The Chronicle, had become a “subculture” that was “ingrained and self-referential and mostly disdained critiques from outsiders, so that an ordinary type of intellectual critique was precluded.”…

What Sokal exposed was — and remains — radical relativism that asserts the impossibility of serious science and scholarship.