In last week’s Brandeis commencement speech, Leon Wieseltier argued that never has there been a moment in American life when the humanities were respected less but needed more. “In recent years I have come to regard a commitment to the humanities as nothing less than an act of intellectual defiance, of cultural dissidence,” he said.
The Rebellious English Major
Tuesday New Release Day: Toynton, Morrison
New this week is Evelyn Toynton’s The Oriental Wife, a novel of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, landed in New York. Also out is Grant Morrison’s Supergods, a scholarly exploration of comic book superheroes.
Kiley Reid on the Babysitter’s Dilemma
In Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid used her own experience as a babysitter to explore the transactional relationship that exists when caring for someone's child.
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New Chabon Story
Recommended reading: A new short story from Michael Chabon is now available from Tablet.
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Eric Nguyen Learns to Live with History
Eric Nguyen discusses his new novel, Things We Lost to the Water, and how Vietnamese American literature processes the ongoing influence of colonialism.
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On the Rise of the Mass Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia has been growing larger and more democratic for hundreds of years, but the spread of today’s mass intelligentsia “is arguably happening on a far larger scale,” writes Philosophy For Life author Jules Evans.
Literary Self-Help
Paris Review editor Lorin Stein recommends a couple of self-help books to one reader in this week’s mail blog. “Let your self-help freak flag fly!” he writes. Such might put you in esteemed company. As Maria Bustillos pointed out in her poignant investigation for The Awl, David Foster Wallace treasured many self help books.
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Calm Before the Storm
Huzzah! 336 issues of the avant-garde magazine The Storm (1910-1932) have just been digitized and are available for download. Some notable contributors to The Storm included Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and many others.
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