News articles and commentary on the place of the humanities in the modern world.
STEM without poetry is like life without metaphor (Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy and Uri Wilensky, Hechinger Report)
STEM without poetry is like life without metaphor: how scientists may improve their writing and understanding by reading literature. From the editorial: It is within the lines of poetry that students can discover, celebrate and appreciate [...]
How can we reintegrate knowledge in a simple and useful way? (Charles Eames)
How can we reintegrate knowledge in a simple and useful way? Forty years ago, a leading designer reflects on the challenges created by divisions in higher education. From the article: Unfortunately, universities today are becoming [...]
Caring for the soul: where psychiatry and religion meet (Richard Gallagher, Washington Post)
Caring for the soul: where psychiatry and religion meet. Religion and science collaborate in order to help the spiritually afflicted, and thereby challenge the doctrinal conventions of each. From the editorial: Is it possible to [...]
Thinking, feeling, reading (Susan Reynolds, Psychology Today)
Thinking, feeling, reading: how not just what you read, but how you read, affects your soul and self. From the article: Recent research also revealed that “deep reading”—defined as reading that is slow, immersive, rich [...]
Natural empathy and artificial intelligence (Satya Nadella, Slate)
Natural empathy and artificial intelligence: the CEO of Microsoft calls for a greater appreciation of the human condition as computational technology becomes more sophisticated. From the editorial: At a developer conference earlier this year, I shared [...]
Liberal arts needed in the tech world (David Kalt, Wall Street Journal)
Liberal arts needed in the tech world: why having a facility for languages, of all sorts, enhances the richness of software development. From the editorial: Most liberal arts degrees encourage a well-rounded curriculum that can give [...]
AI is coming, and it’s our boon (Brian Fung, Washington Post)
AI is coming, and it's our boon: how working with computers and technology can, in fact, aid the inquiry into ourselves. From the editorial: Making artificial intelligence easy for regular people to use and love depends on [...]
Literature, therapy, and healing (Andrew Solomon, The Guardian)
How language -- its clarity, immediacy, and nuance -- is vital to both patients and doctors, for it can overcome the split between scientific specialization and the experience of suffering. From the article: Many of the [...]
In Praise of Encyclopedias (Joseph Epstein, Wall Street Journal)
Has the age of the encyclopedic excellence passed us by, or can (or should) it be revived? The author praises the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (1910-11) as "the last great encyclopedia." From the [...]
Science first, humanities later (Vinod Khosla, Medium)
Science first, humanities later: logic and computer science beat Jane Austen and Shakespeare. From the editorial: Though Jane Austen and Shakespeare might be important, they are far less important than many other things that are more [...]