Tag: Humanities

Mission Impossible

The university has been changing, to be sure. But has the proportion of students who want to devote themselves to acts of humanistic creativity?

From Slate to Silicon?

Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony ...

The Book Is a Time Machine

When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious ...

How to Predict a Bestseller

Literary theory is not a field that creates many bestsellers. Biographies of Shakespeare will always have a market, and now and then a work like Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae rides a wave of ...

Against Careerism, For College

Having just seen a new crop of students graduate from my university, and seeing them now off into the world—to jobs, internships, and further study—I find myself thinking about what college is for ...

Public Picks 2016

Finals have been graded, graduates have been feted, and the days are still getting longer. That means one thing: time to start planning your summer reading! Each year around this time, the editorial ...

Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 1

Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into their genome and shaping the stories they tell, from the earliest newspaper strips (chronic allergies in ...

Stop Hyping Academic Freedom

Universities may be among the oldest of our institutions, but they have changed significantly during the millennium or so since they were established. Roughly speaking, the history of the European ...

Shakespeare Off the Grid

Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Station Eleven, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction, depicts a world radically depopulated by a vicious outbreak of superflu. A traveling ...