In Florida, legislators are wondering whether or not they should raise tuition costs for students studying the humanities, or really anything other than STEM fields. Likewise, James Dyson (yes, the vacuum guy) bemoans Britain’s abundance of “students choosing to read humanities at university.” As a rejoinder, one New Statesman blogger notes that the study of humanities does not inhibit technological innovation, and that as a bonus, “we gain from having people who reshape our cultural landscape and put things in new contexts.”
Perils of the Humanities Students
Culture Shock
“When it comes to living in a democracy, Nato Thompson argues, nothing affects us more directly and more powerfully than culture. Culture suffuses the world we live in, from TV to music to advertising to sports. And all these things, Thompson writes in his new book, Culture as Weapon, ‘influence our emotions, our actions, and our very understanding of ourselves as citizens.'”
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The Words of E.B. White
E. B. White is one of those writers you are liable to meet again and again in the course of a reading life, each time wearing a different expression. To children, he is the author of Charlotte’s Web; to college students, he is half of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Later on, he helped define the voice of the early New Yorker. Now all those Whites have been brought together in the pages of In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations from America’s Most Companionable of Writers, an anthology of quotations edited by his granddaughter Martha White.
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The Great Millenial Novelist
Madeleine Schwartz examines the works of Sally Rooney, who was recently crowned "the great millennial novelist," by many critics.
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Paris Review to Publish Bolaño
For its spring issue, the Paris Review will be publishing Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich—its first serialized novel in forty years—with original illustrations by Leanne Shapton. It’s a chance to discover Bolaño’s famous lost novel almost a year before it appears in book form.
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Forty Stories
The wonderful folks at Harper Perennial are giving away a free PDF of forty short stories from the likes of Adam Wilson, Blake Butler, Roxane Gay, Kyle Minor, and many more. On July 17th, the group will also release Forty Stories as a free eBook through “all the major retailers,” too.
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This is a debate that goes back literally for centuries. I wrote an essay about it, inspired by a speech by Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who echoed the sentiments expressed here by James Dyson, to wit: that we ought not to waste more time and money studying the humanities .The essay was published by O’Reilly Radar and can be found here:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/09/science-art-engineering-humanities.html
Dyson should thank his lucky stars for the humanities majors who came up with the brilliant ad campaign that helped make his incredible expensive vacuums (they ARE very good vacuums, mind) a huge success. Without them, he might be an obscure tinkerer.