humanities

One of the perils of book reviewing, or any other form of literary analysis is putting more thought into some aspect of a book than the author did. It's one of the aspects of the humanities aide of academia that, from time to time, strains my ability to be respectful of the scholarly activities of my colleagues on the other side of campus. And it frequently undermines reviews of books that I've already read. A couple of good examples come from this Paul Di Filippo column for Barnes and Noble, where he reviews two books I've read, and one I haven't. I haven't actually read his comments on the…
I recently participated in a survey of higher education professionals about various aspects of the job. It was very clearly designed by and aimed at scholars in the humanities and social sciences, to the point where answering questions honestly made me feel like a Bad Person. For example, there were numerous questions about teaching methods that just aren't applicable to what I teach-- things like learning through community service. while there is some truth to the old cliche that you never really learn something until you have to teach it, something like turning a bunch of would-be engineers…
I've got draft versions of all the chapters of the book-in-progress now, which is great. Of course, when you add up all the words in those chapters, it comes to 92,000, when the contract calls for 70,000. Which means I've entered the part of the writing process where progress is measured not by how many new words I type, but how many old ones I can make disappear. I always find this faintly depressing, but it's a nearly inevitable part of serious writing for me. There have been a few cases where I've had open-ended writing assignments-- one of the papers I published in grad school, and my Ph.…
I am Peter Economy, and I have for as long as I can remember been a fan and practitioner of both the arts (specifically, the musical arts) and science. Some years ago, I had the very good fortune to be invited by Harvey Seifter to help him write a book on New York's Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and its unique leadership model. As you may know, one of the things that sets Orpheus apart from most other orchestras is that it has no conductor. Instead, different musicians within the orchestra take on leadership roles depending on their own talents and interests. The book -- Leadership Ensemble:…
A major focus of The Art of Science Learning project is about attracting more students into the sciences and helping these STEM students become more creative and imaginative as they participate in the workforce. But we should remember this is not just about the "STEM students" and assisting our physicists and engineers become more creative. It's also about bringing "science literacy" to a broader public - so that we are all better informed about our world and can make smarter personal decisions about issues that intersect with, say, how our bodies work, whether biofuels are good for the…
I'm taking some flak in the comments to yesterday's book recommendation request post, so let me illustrate what I meant with an example. Lots of people recommended the Andrew Lang Fairy books, which are freely available online. I looked at the first story in the first book, which is plenty entertaining, but also has this bit that stopped me short: Hardly had [an evil sorceror] reached his own house when, taking the ring, he said, "Bronze ring, obey thy master. I desire that the golden ship shall turn to black wood, and the crew to hideous negroes; that St. Nicholas shall leave the helm and…
There's a new wrinkle in the endless controversy about Huckleberry Finn, with NewSouth Books preparing an expurgated edition replacing "nigger" with "slave" throughout. Sentiment in the parts of the Internet I frequent is mostly against the change, which has been made with the goal of getting it back on high school reading lists, which it has fallen off in many places because of concerns over the language. (Note that it doesn't appear to have been done in response to any great outcry for such an edition: "Mr. Gribben said no schools had expressed interest yet in teaching the book.") It's a…
It's time now to talk about two of the greatest mentor figures in the literature of the fantastic. You know their stories well, I'm sure, but the parallels between them are eerie: Both are gruff but kindly mentor figures who provide crucial guidance for the young and naive protagonist of the story as he moves out into a scary world to complete an important quest. Both fall into a chasm while battling a fearsome monster to allow the protagonist time to flee. Both return from their apparent death when least expected, just in time to save the day. Both have awesomely impressive beards. I am…
I've probably gotten a dozen pointers to Gregory Petsko's open letter in support of the humanities, addressed to the President of SUNY-Albany, over the last couple of weeks (the link is to a reposting of the letter at Inside Higher Ed; it was originally on Petsko's own blog). I haven't linked to it or commented on it here, mostly because while I'm broadly sympathetic with his position, after the second use of "[Famous Writer] said [interesting thing] which I'm sure your department of [humanities field] could tell you about, if you hadn't eliminated them," my reaction had shifted significantly…
It's that time of year again-- the Swedes will be handing out money to famous scientists, with the announcements of who's getting what starting one week from today. Thus, the traditional Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Picking Contest: Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one of this year's Nobel Prizes. Anyone who correctly picks both the field and the laureate will win a guest-post spot on this blog. The usual terms and conditions apply. If you don't have anything you'd like to guest-post about, you can exchange your guest post for a signed copy of How to Teach Physics…
Hannu Ranjaniemi's The Quantrum Thief has generated a lot of buzz, but doesn't seem to be available on this side of the Atlantic (not without exorbitant shipping charges, anyway). As a result, I haven't read anything of his, so I was happy to see "Elegy for a Young Elk on the Short Story Club list. This is a story in the trendy posthuman post-apocalypse genre. The main character, Kosonen, is a former poet living a rustic existence on an Earth largely devoid of humans after some sort of past catastrophe that has left most animals sentient (his best friend is a talking bear, and he has to…
In comments to yesterday's post about my favorite Many-Worlds story, a couple of people mention "All the Myriad Ways," a Larry Niven short story. I don't think I've ever actually read the story, but it gets brought up all the time, so I'm familiar with the concept. It's an angle on Many-Worlds that I don't like, and has something in common with the central conceit of Inception, which is also not high on my list of literary tropes, though my reaction isn't anywhere near as negative as Scott's. If you're not familiar with it, here's the summary from Wikipedia: A police detective, pondering a…
Back in one of the communications skills threads, Karen comments about science and humanities: It's easy enough for a humanities major to avoid doing much science in school. The converse is not true. It strikes me that for those earlier scientists who attended univeristy, both their early education and university years were more suited to focusing on the science. This relates to the communication issue as this often means that the science inclined are often put in a position of being evaluated on their communication in area that are areas of weakness for them, those areas where communications…
The Steinmetz Symposium is today at Union, as mentioned in yesterday's silly poll about fears (I love the fact that "Wavefunction Collapse" leads "Monsters from the Id" by one vote at the time of this writing-- my readers are awesome). As a more serious follow-up, there were two presentation options offered to the students, and this year's physics majors overwhelmingly chose one over the other. I'm curious as to how many people would make the same choice, so here's a poll: You have to give a presentation about a research project you have done. Which of these presentation types would you…
Back when I was in grad school, and paper copies of journals were delivered to the lab by a happy mailman riding a brontosaurus, I used to play a little game when the new copy of Physical Review Letters arrived: I would flip through the papers in the high energy and nuclear physics sections, and see if I could find one where the author list included at least one surname for every letter of the alphabet. There wasn't one every week, but it wasn't that hard (particularly with large numbers of physicists from China, where family names beginning with "X" are more common). Every so often, somebody…
The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post on the economics of conference attendance, inspired by Brian Croxall's essay about why he didn't attend the MLA. The key problem for both of them is that the way the academic job market is structured inn the humanities forces job seekers to attend the MLA for "screening interviews," used to cut a long list of applicants down to the three or so who will be invited to campus. This is almost a two cultures moment, because this isn't the situation in my part of academia. It's not that the job market is any better, but there isn't the same automatic…
Janet has a post grappling with the ethical implications of telling children about Santa Claus. SteelyKid is too young for this to be an issue yet, but on this issue, like many others, I turn to my favorite literary philosopher, Terry Pratchett: "All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little--" YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE…
I failed to write something on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall yesterday, partly because I think the other six million blog posts on the subject had it pretty well covered. Another factor, though, was the fact that I don't have the sort of crystal-clear recollection of where I was and what I was doing on that night. I can reconstruct where I must've been-- I was a college freshman, so I would've watched it in the tv room on the second floor of Fayerweather-- but I don't clearly recall the event itself. It's all mixed together with the endless discussions of What It All Meant…
Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled "7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School," which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty: What is good writing? Ask an English teacher, and they'll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They'll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they're really honest, they'll admit it has a scholarly tone -- prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could've been written by Willie…
It's hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr's article on polymaths so irritating, but I suspect it was this bit: The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks--policy or science--the experts start to erect barricades. "Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry," Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. "Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very…