Journalism

At the American Historical Association's annual meeting, a panel of scholars talked about the histories that made the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last year such a flashpoint for protest. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education »

Jack Russell Weinstein, a professor of philosophy at the University of North Dakota, hosts a regular talk show about philosophy on the state's public-radio network. Mr. Weinstein’s philosophy about philosophy—that it’s both an academic and an extra-academic set of activities—reflects a growing awareness among humanists that they need to move beyond the rhetoric of crisis to share what they do with the wider world. In an era of never enough money, especially for the humanities, going public can be both satisfying and a survival strategy, a way to demonstrate to college administrations and state legislatures that disciplines like philosophy are worth investing in. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) »

Inspired by "Failure in the Archives," a conference held at University College London, I talked to researchers and archivists about some of the frustrations and wrong turns they encounter in their work: Humanities scholars rarely talk about their failures. Publications and promotion depend on making discoveries in the archives, not losing one’s way in them. But as researchers try to recover lives and experiences absent from the official record, they work within archival systems that weren’t set up to help them find what they’re in search of. And digital-era scholars with a world of information at their fingertips don’t always have the patience or the know-how to pick through the idiosyncratic records of the past. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) »

A neat set of Thoreau-themed projects at SUNY-Geneseo emphasizes learning by doing: It’s a picture-perfect late-September afternoon in upstate New York, and Ed Gillin has taken his English class outside. Dressed in baggy trousers and shirt, a straw hat perched on his head, he looks like a beardless Walt Whitman—but it’s another iconic American writer, Henry David Thoreau, who’s gotten the professor and his undergraduates out into the autumn sunshine. Mr. Gillin, a professor of English at the State University of New York College at Geneseo, teaches a course called the "Thoreau-Harding Project". This fall, as his students read their way through Walden, they aren’t just grappling with the text; they’re working out how to build a cabin like the one Thoreau built in 1845 at Walden Pond. Saws and hammers don’t usually figure in the literary critic’s toolbox. But the hands-on approach that Mr. Gillin wants his students to take to Walden reflects Thoreau’s belief that one should learn by doing. And it complements another project, Digital Thoreau—led by Mr. Gillin’s English-department colleague Paul Schacht—that uses digital tools to get inside Walden. Read More at The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) »

Is this internet killing books? What do poetry and software have in common? Can computers write literature? I write about three new books that dig into those questions, including Vikram Chandra's Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software. From the review: Nostalgia, not the internet, is killing literature. Even if the surfing and grazing and browsing we do online have ruined us for anything longer than a blog post – and I’m not convinced that sustained attention is altogether a lost cause – the cure does not lie in longing for some half- invented time when serious people lost themselves in novels. Read More at The Times Literary Supplement »