Doom and Gloom in the Humanities

"Any which way you care to look at them, the humanities in the United States are in radical, sharp decline. The number of history students is down about 45 per cent since 2007, the number of English students has halved since the late 1990s." . . .

"The most common response to the humanities crisis at the MLA was lament. At the many, many panels devoted to decline that I attended, many, many academics bemoaned their state, confessing to profound spasms of guilt and despair, and exploring 'the larger cultural devaluation of the humanities'." . . .

"As the humanities decline in the United States, the country is losing the craft of understanding, losing its capacity for citizenship. Even educated people are increasingly unable and unwilling to distinguish between fake and real information, becoming a community that cannot understand itself as anything more than a circulation of figures. Self-righteousness takes the place of substantive discussion. Narcissism and outrage become the dominant techniques of self-definition. And the cure for all these problems is the same: read widely, read deeply, read."

The full article, "Back in the MLA" by Stephen Marche, is at the TLS website here. 

Peace on Earth, 1939

This short (8 1/2 minutes) animated film is one I'd never encountered before.  A quite dark fable for all times, well worth watching. It was made by Hugh Harman, and released in December 1939. In it an elderly squirrel tells his two grandchildren about how man became extinct. Watch the film here.

The Lost Art of Criticism

"A critic who is driven primarily by their politics, who is blinded by their own sense of moral superiority, or who cannot temporarily surrender to the worldview of their subject, can barely be said to be a critic at all"

From "The Lost Art of Criticism" by Andrew Doyle.  Full article here.

The Frankenstein Notebooks at the Bodleian Library

A fascinating Bodleian Library Discussion, click here.

 

Description: 

An examination of the notebooks in which Mary Shelley drafted Frankenstein. These two notebooks, one purchased probably in Geneva, the second in England, are now kept in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

With: Miranda Seymour, biographer of Mary Shelley, Richard Ovenden, Bodley's Librarian, Stephen Hebron, curator and author of Shelley's Ghost

Recorded on Saturday, 24 March, 2018, for Frankenreads 2018

The 1910 Edison film of Frankenstein has been restored!

Read and watch here.  Fascinating!

The Books That Made Dracula

Stoker's 1890 application for membership in the London Library

"The London Library today unveiled a fascinating discovery that sheds new light on how Dracula was researched and written. We've found 26 books that are almost certainly the original copies that Bram Stoker used to help research his enduring classic."

Read the full article here.  (And watch the video there too!)  

Free Will Has Become Dangerous

Governments and corporations will soon know you better than you know yourself. Belief in the idea of ‘free will’ has become dangerous.

Read "The Myth of Freedom" by Yuval Noah Harari here.