There’s only one certainty here. This will happen again. We all hope not at our schools. And when the news breaks, we will hope that no one we know was involved, that the shooter wasn’t moving among our friends and colleagues, wasn’t studying anything in our area, wasn’t anything like anyone we’ve ever known or been. It is sure to be a loner or set of loners, ostracized, picked on, at a moment of great stress—the end of the semester...
Admit it. This picture’s just the teensiest bit creepy. It accompanies John Tierney’s “When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays,” a NYT article reviewing research by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert published last week in Science magazine. The image is, in other words, twice removed from the original research, which involves using an iPhone app to collect data on the relationship between attentiveness and...
“As a fundraising piece, it is disappointing because it focuses on tools of delivery to the complete exclusion of disciplinary, departmentally-based content.” Nearly three years ago, I was invited to make a presentation to the Board of Governors about my proposal for the establishment of a Center for the New Humanities at Rutgers. The university was in the “quiet phase” of what is now its public Billion Dollar Capital...
The Death of the Humanities, Act five, Scene four: Action! Messenger enters stage left, exasperated: “How can you still be still there, typing? The barbarians are at the gates. Can you not hear their fury? The rattling of the chains?” The professor looks up, surprised. “But I am fighting, can’t you see? I’m here, in my office, writing a letter to SUNY’s President right now. “A letter?” “Yes....
The following is not exactly an obit for the humanities, but rather evidence that the humanities died long ago and now walk the earth, haggard and decaying, accompanied by the sound of the swarming buzz and hum of the undead. It’s a call for papers for a conference on “Sex, Death, and Boredom”–in just that order, as one would expect from the undead. (First comes sex, then comes death, then comes boredom in the baby...
