Front Cover
Special Issue: The Future of the Humanities
The Future of the Humanities and the Specter of Antisemitism
According to the sages, God begins with one and not two, so that no one can say to another, “My side of the family is better than your side of the family”: there is only one side of the human family, with all the ethical obligations that come to bear in being part of the human family.
Can the Humanities Flourish in Prison?
After a Shakespeare performance class in prison, it is about going to bed with, not sugar plums dancing in your head, but with an iambic rhythm that echoes through the night against the blare of a loudspeaker that rarely quietens amidst the bright lights outside your cell that never dim.
Expertise and Education
If one is willing to dwell on the difficulty, to be unsettled and challenged by it, one can develop a flexibility, a stamina, an imagination of thought.
The Art of Conversation and the Revival of the Humanities
Montaigne’s comparative method encourages a complex mixture of appreciation of the many ways human beings live their lives, modesty about one’s dispositions and accomplishments, and the free but unpresumptuous exercise of individual judgment about the whole.
Rage against the University Machine
As far back as 62 BC, the Roman statesman, philosopher, and orator Cicero had announced that the studia humanitatis (“the studies of humanity”) were valuable because they instilled the crucial quality of humanitas (“benevolence,” “kindliness,” “humaneness”) in their devotees.
Form Fatigue
For the Yup’ik of Alaska, objects and human experiences constituted a complex and unified worldview inextricably weaving together the material, spiritual, and personal.
From STEM to STEAM
Science fiction has the benefits of both worlds—those of sciences and humanities, and its popularity among the reading public is the consequence of both technological advancement and the innate drives of the human desire to control one’s world and destiny in the postmodern and posthuman age of media and telecommunications.
A New Horizon for the Study of the Arts and Humanities
The original work will not change and does not have to change in order to maintain its power, whereas the translation needs to be revitalized as the cultural and social standards and energies of each century change.
Dark Posthumanism and the Novel
What updates are required of the novel — a technology allegedly designed as a vehicle of liberal humanism — in the era of dark posthumanism?
Insider Exile
Melville’s narrator is someone whose secular critique is just strong enough to needle the professional class but too weak to do more than lament the plight of labor.
Maps of Meaning
The People’s Choice
The fatal weakness in social contract theories is that no one remembers ever making such a contract.
The Subjunctive Grammar of Hope
Not only may past and future be discovered within the present, but that our only access to future, or to past, is within the fleeting moment of the present.
Sciences and Arts
Transcending Barriers
Rare Earth pairs works of Chinese art from the Crow Museum’s permanent collection with connoisseur-level samples of raw minerals from China.
Techno-Wizardry and the De-extinction of Celia the Ibex
On a cold and misty January 6, 2000, a fir tree in the Ordesa valley of the Spanish Pyrenees fell to the forest floor, crushing the last known individual of Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica—an ibex species that had been endemic the mountain range between Spain and France since the late Pleistocene.
Folio
Literary Lives
Joel Barlow’s Eccentric American Vision
Barlow believed that “Science and republican progress, coupled with religion and the growing humanity of man, portended the millennium, which he believed would take place on earth before the second coming of God.”
God’s Friends
Sigrid Undset, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, is without question one of Norway’s most famous and influential novelists.
The Past is Present
“My Side of the Line”
By this definition, heroic and inspirational characters such as Batman and Spider-Man, among many others, are all vigilantes, but, on the other hand, so are the vigilantes who comprised the mob that stormed the Capitol, and the Punisher seems closer in his methodology to these real-life vigilantes.
Art Worlds
On the Multipart Works of John Wilcox
An artwork became another object in Wilcox’s world—like a fossil picked up on a walk, a phrase clipped from a newspaper, or the shape of a radio or transmission tower—whose meaning could be made and remade through ever-shifting relations with other objects to form a new whole.
Mark and Dot
While their careers took vastly differing paths—Tworkov had the mark and Kusama had the dot—their philosophical and gestural strategies ran in parallel, sharing a skepticism of prevailing aesthetic orthodoxies.
A State of Speechless Wonder and Awe
For Adams, beauty is “a synonym for coherence and structure underlying life… beauty is the overriding demonstration of pattern that one observes.”
