The Amateur Humanist
When the map seems larger than the territory
Sunday, April 12, 2009
On one of the websites for students of rhetorical theory, conversation has recently focused on the status of psychoanalytic criticism and the question of whether its insights are being willfully
The future of globalized literary history
Saturday, April 11, 2009
A 2008 special issue of New Literary History (vol. 39) is focused on the future of literary history (and, relatedly, comparative literary studies) given globalization. To some extent one can track
How computer modeling worsened the crisis
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Joseph Fuller, co-founder of Monitor, a global consulting firm, “The Terminator Comes to Wall Street: How Computer Modeling Worsened the Financial Crisis and What We Ought to Do About It,” American
An updated case for the Great Books
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Thomas Dillon, president of Thomas Aquinas College, on “Liberal Education and the Future of American Schooling,” Education Week, 11 March 2009, pgs. 30-31:
Freshmen at my college arrive quite well
Thalberg: Making the piano sensitive
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Sigismund Thalberg’s piano performance tour of the United States prior to the Civil War came at a key point in the nation’s cultural emergence on the world scene. By the 1830’s the United States’
The importance of watching
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
I’m not quite finished with it yet, but Paul Woodruff’s recent The Necessity of Theatre: The Art of Watching and Being Watched (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) makes a compelling case for
An approaching Singularity?
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
When Ray Kurzweil published his bestseller, The Singularity is Near, in 2005, the skeptical response reverberated widely, but his track record when it comes to having made accurate predictions has
Disseminating university research
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
From “The University’s Role in the Dissemination of Research and Scholarship – A Call to Action,” a jointly prepared task force report of the Association of American Universities, the Association of
The practicality of the humanities
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
From Leon Wieseltier, “The Tolstoy Bailout,” New Republic, 18 March 2009, pg. 48:
The complaint against the humanities is that they are impractical. This is true. They will not change the world.
Do students feel grade entitled?
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
From Max Roosevelt, “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes,” New York Times, 18 February 2009:
Prof. Marshall Grossman has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers
The kindness of crowds
Monday, April 6, 2009
From “The Kindness of Crowds,” Economist, 28 February 2009, pg. 83-84:
According to a much-reported survey carried out in 2002, Britain then had 4.3 million closed-circuit television (CCTV)
Digital/classical
Monday, April 6, 2009
From Laura Battle, “Face the Virtual Music,” Financial Times of London, March 7-8, 2009, pg. 12 (Life & Arts section):
In the beginning was the radio. From its inception and throughout the 20th
Mendelssohn at two hundred
Sunday, April 5, 2009
From Alex Ross, “The Youngest Master: Mendelssohn at Two Hundred,” New Yorker, 23 February 2009, pgs. 77-78:
Felix Mendelssohn, whose two-hundredth birthday fell on February 3, was the most
Civil rights right before Rosa
Saturday, April 4, 2009
From Leon Litwack’s 2008 presidential address to the Southern Historical Association, “’Fight the Power!’ The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Southern History 75.1 (February 2009),
Carole McAlpine Watson interim NEH chair
Friday, April 3, 2009
As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 February 2009:
The Obama Administration today named Carole McAlpine Watson as acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She
Throw the humanities under the bus?
Sunday, February 15, 2009
EXHIBIT A: Howard Schweber, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, advising flagships on how to handle the downturn:
The mission of flagships is commonly described as research, teaching,
Social animals, collective decisions
Saturday, February 14, 2009
From “Decisions, Decisions,” Economist, 14 February 2009, pgs. 89-90:
Dictators and authoritarians will disagree, but democracies work better. It has long been held that decisions made
Should humanists learn to program?
Saturday, February 14, 2009
From Matthew Kirschenbaum, associate professor of English and associate director of the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland in College Park, “Hello
The bizarre but brilliant Paul Wittgenstein
Friday, February 13, 2009
From Evelyn Toynton, “Unhappy Together: The Wittgenstein Family Feud,” a review of Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (Doubleday), in Harper’s Magazine, March 2009, pgs.
Do web sites help sell books? Who knows?
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
From J. Courtney Sullivan, “See the Web Site, Buy The Book,” New York Times Book Review, 25 January 2009, pg. 23:
Publishers have long hoped that, say, a jacket by Chip Kidd or an author photo by
Using the media to teach science
Monday, February 2, 2009
From Sean Cavanaugh, “Informal Experiences Can Go a Long Way in Teaching Science,” Education Week, 28 January 2009, pg. 7:
A new study finds solid evidence that some of [these tools, including
Stimulus idea #5823: Digitize!
Sunday, February 1, 2009
From Charles Lowry, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, “Let’s Spur Recovery by Investing in Information,” Chronicle (of Higher Education) Review, 6 February 2009, pg. B4:
The rape of the humanities
Saturday, January 24, 2009
From Alison Phipps, “Violence and Exploitation in the Humanities,” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 8.1 (2009): pgs. 5-7:
A report from the UK’s British Academy has just ‘hit’ my desk:
Media studies and the digital humanities
Saturday, January 24, 2009
From an essay by Tara McPherson, “Media Studies and the Digital Humanities,” Cinema Journal 48.2 (Winter 2009): pgs 119-123, introducing a forum on the topic:
Through the decades, ...humanities
Where every word is weighed, and new...
Friday, January 23, 2009
From the Nobel Lecture given by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska on winning the literature prize in 1996 (translated here by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh):
I sometimes dream of
And now, a little Byron...
Thursday, January 22, 2009
A verse from Lord Byron’s Stanzas to Augusta (VI, 1816):
From the wreck of the past, which hath perish’d,
Thus much I at least may recall,
It hath taught me that what I most cherish’d
Remembering Harold Pinter
Monday, January 19, 2009
Several of the obituaries for Harold Pinter, the Nobel prize winning playwright who died on Christmas Eve, see the puzzle of his life as centered on the question of how so happy a person could
With respect to telephone poles
Monday, January 19, 2009
From Eula Biss, “Time and Distance Overcome,” Iowa Review, Spring 2008, excerpted in Harpers Magazine, February 2009, pgs. 19-22:
By 1889, the New York Times was reporting a “War on Telephone
The lessons derived from aging backward
Monday, January 19, 2009
I enjoyed seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but not because the film finally coheres into a memorable totality but rather since the sum of the parts end up actually greater than the whole,
How the press helps democracy... Really...
Monday, January 19, 2009
From Michael Schudson and Danielle Haas, “Feet to the Fire,” Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2009, pg. 63:
Two economists, who went looking for proof, found little hard evidence – good
Counting the humanities
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Last week the American Academy of Arts and Sciences released a long-anticipated prototype of its Humanities Indicators project. The initiative – organized a decade ago by the American Council of
What does this box signify?
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Roughly seven years ago the discovery of a 2000-year old bone box (or, ossuary) which is engraved with the words James, Son of Joseph, brother of Jesus, was announced, setting in motion a media,
The earth’s imperiled oceans
Monday, January 5, 2009
Here are ten interesting facts about the world’s oceans I gleaned this morning from an insert in the new issue of Economist magazine (3 January 2009), not exactly Europe’s Marxist Review – I
Publishing the papers of the U.S. founders
Saturday, January 3, 2009
More than a half century ago, the Congress committed to producing definitive editions of the papers of the American founders – Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, George Washington, James Madison,
Bruce Cole and the endowment
Friday, January 2, 2009
With Bruce Cole’s announcement November 12 that he would be leaving his position as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, President-elect Obama will have the opportunity to select
When social science is painful
Thursday, January 1, 2009
The latest issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (#621, January 2009) is wholly focused on the report authored in 1965 (read it here) by Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Neil Armstrong’s sublime silence
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Over the holiday I had a chance to watch Ron Howard’s elegant documentary about the US-USSR race to the moon, a film that interviewed nearly all those who still live and walked on the moon. All,
Making the White House an arts salon
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
From Jed Perl, arts editor for the New Republic, “Obamalot,” The New Republic, 31 December 2008, pgs. 9-10:
Nobody need wonder why, in Washington, the arts have become something of an
The death of the literary critic
Sunday, December 28, 2008
I’ve just finished Rónán McDonald’s little book, The Death of the Critic (London: Continuum, 2007), the broad point of which is to decry the diminution of the literary critical role in society that
On student cheating
Saturday, December 27, 2008
If you work in education, you likely saw the reports earlier this month relating to a new study on the incidence of high school cheating. David Crary wrote the Associated Press report I saw, which
Tracking developments in the academic humanities, humanities funding and policy, and the broader currents of humanistic scholarship.
