Andrew Hazlett discovers that following the keyword “humanities” on Twitter is not the best way to keep tabs on the discipline.
Oh, The Humanities
It’s All Volapük To Me
"'A language without umlauts,' he wrote, 'sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring.'" If Esperanto just doesn't have enough umlauts, Volapük just might be the right made-up language for you.
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The Morning News Tournament of Books
Emma Straub declares Julian Barnes's Sense of an Ending fitter than Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil All the Time in the opening round of The Morning News Tournament of Books.
The Land of the Setting Sun
From the Ruins of Empire author Pankaj Mishra recently visited Japan and wrote about the experience for Caravan. In particular, he was struck by the ways “much of [the country] presents a spectacle of aged modernity,” and how “it is with some shock that you recall that Japan was where once the future lay, before its bubble burst in the early 1990s, and the country, pushed inward by adversity, became a strange absence in our lives.”
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Allan Seager’s Place in the Canon
John Warner's great uncle Allan Seager wrote a short story "etched permanently into the American consciousness in a way even Hemingway can’t match." In this marvelous essay, Warner investigates the writer's inspiration and legacy.
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“Strings unleashing”
“I have tried them all,
The cotton, the nylon,
absorbing water, rolling in sand,
sticky flakes of broken glass.
We all drown in the end.”
Anne Sexton’s summer bikini tips.
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Self Publishing Textbooks
A Minnesota high school is saving money on textbooks... by writing its own.
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Hey, thanks for the notice! Big fan of The Millions (and the new design).
I don’t want to beat a dead (or dying) horse, but the “humanities” Twitter stream continues to crank out amusing/depressing commentary…
Case in point: “mann there supposed to be cute girls in humanities classes. the women look like chernobyl victims in here. this class must be hard. shit”
On the other hand, you also get kids tweeting things like: “Humanities is probably going to be the best class ever. :) I’m pumped!”
The thing that baffles me is that so many schools are apparently cramming everything from archaeology to philosophy to history to art criticism into *one* course. How the hell is that supposed to lead to anything worthwhile?