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
Obama’s Books
In support of “Small Business Saturday,” President Obama took his daughters shopping for books at Kramerbooks in D.C. So, which books made it to the register?
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Behind the Longreads
On January 25th, if you’re in New York City, you could do worse than to listen to a handful of New York Magazine editors discuss non-fiction storytelling. The event is being held in conjunction with Longreads and Housing Works Bookstore Café.
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For the Viral Good
As you may have heard, Twitter went public last week, which means a lot of people are trying to figure out just what its IPO means for social media. Over at n+1, Benjamin Kunkel proposes that social media, by its very nature, cannot be profitable, and thus should be administered by the state as a public good.
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The Size Queens release iBook/Album “To The Country”
The Size Queens re-conceptualize the album with their release of To The Country, a hybrid iBook/album whose “interpenetrations of song, text, and image” aim to generate new narrative forms. Band member/author Adam Klein writes: “We create these imagined worlds together, simultaneously uncontaminated and corrupted, through metaphor and code. ‘The country’ and the new world of applications are always polyvalent; it is impossible to make them remain at our service.” Also! This textual/aural collaboration features original stories by Lynne Tillman, Rick Moody, Maria Bustillos, and Joy Williams (first line reads: “Daddy didn’t want to be a social being and he didn’t want us to be social beings so here we are.“) Download To The Country here (it’s free!) and read/listen/weep.
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Moscow Fact Check
The political unrest in Moscow is significant and worth covering, but it’s important to verify the facts. Over the weekend, a picture of an enormous crowd went viral, and it was billed as an image of anti-Putin demonstrations. This is not true. The image is actually from a 1991 rally in which protesters called for Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation. It even appears in this Atlantic article from December, 2011.
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.