On silence. Why poets, and others, look for quietude – with lovers, friends, or by themselves – in lieu of words Doodle: Good morning, Noodle. You appear deep in thought. Noodle: Thanks for the interruption. I’m puzzled by a poem. As a professor of the humanities, I’ve read a lot of poetry, and should be [...]
An historian asks about the ways the humanities are suitable for modern society.
Humanities in the Age of Big Data: an historian tries to unravel the consequences for ourselves and our way of life. Dataism is a new ethical system that says, yes, humans were special and important because up until now they were the most sophisticated data processing system in the universe, but this is no longer [...]
How the humanities may lead us to greater self-knowledge, beyond the demands of the market place.
What do the humanities have to say? And who should listen? A note from Mary Beard, at year's end: They have just issued on the website a top 24 of Cambridge research stories this year. On my reckoning, 19 of those are pure science.... You’d think from looking at this roster that none of the work that [...]
Material success and intellectual life: worlds collide. Ramesh Ponnuru interviews Robert P. George and Cornell West, with surprising results. From his account: One thing that surprised me about our panel, though, was how little they dwelt on political correctness and how much they talked about another threat to the liberal arts: the tendency to view [...]
History and contingency of knowledge: the ways that studying the past can teach us how we can better understand one another today. From the editorial: My introduction to the power of the liberal arts came in an undergraduate course studying the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.... Until then, I had assumed (as most high school students [...]
On science and the humanities, of and in the world: how closely related are the investigations of the sciences and the humanities? They may begin at a common origin, but they diverge and specialize with different aims in mind where world making is concerned. Science attempts to make a world that remains invariant across human [...]
Education is useless (or rather: is education useless?): a neighborly discussion about what’s worth learning, and where one should learn what's needed -- or useful -- for life. Crimpet: Hello, neighbor. Crumpet: Why are you so happy, Crimpet? You look like you won the office pool. Crimpet: Nothing as wonderful as that. But I’m glad to [...]
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 our approach to A.I. First, we want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences. Ultimately, it’s not going [...]
