The Educator's Notebook

featured articles

“Reframing Art History Through A BIPOC Lens”
Hyperallergic - 8/25/23

“Chiang reports that the reader has been well received by her students so far, with an end-of-semester survey indicating that they found the reader spoke more to their personal interests in art and history, made her courses more relevant to their lives, and provided a more nuanced and complex presentation of history.”
When Citizens Have Scaffolded Discussions, They Agree More Than Politics Might Suggest
America In One Room - 8/1/23

“The Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, in collaboration with Helena and various partners has conducted a national Deliberative Poll® to determine what Americans would really think about possible reforms to our democracy and our electoral processes if they had a chance to weigh the options under good conditions… What would Americans really think if they could discuss the issues in depth in moderated small group discussions with fellow citizens, if they had access to vetted and balanced briefing materials, and if they could get their questions answered by panels of competing experts representing different points of view? NORC at the University of Chicago convened a national sample of nearly 600 deliberators and a separate control group to consider reform proposals from across the political spectrum.”
Humanities Are In Decline. Or Are They?
New Yorker - 3/6/23

““Imagine if you had a voice assistant that could write code for you, and you said, ‘Hey, Alexa, build me a Web site to sell shoes,’ ” Sanjay Sarma, a professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T., told me on the phone. “That’s already happening. It’s called ‘low-code.’ ” There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and its ability to replicate some composition tasks. But ChatGPT can no more conceive “Mrs. Dalloway” than it can guide and people-manage an organization. Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork, and compose basic code, and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse. “I think the future belongs to the humanities,” Sarma said.”
A Globally-Oriented History Of Science
Boston Review - 2/22/23

“Poskett argues that this story is an empirical failure: it misses how science is actually done, and it does a disservice to practicing scientists. Above all, it misses where science is done. Against the standard narrative of a European scientific revolution, Poskett implores us to see science as a global enterprise, the result of the intermingling of people from different cultures and backgrounds.”
ChatGPT Is An Example Machine For Teachers. This Is Excellent.
Cult of Pedagogy - 2/19/23

“Our goal was to help students learn the underlying principles of kinetic and potential energy. We used ChatGPT to generate a range of different examples of kinetic and potential energy. Kids could sort these examples into categories and then explain their choices. In the screenshots below, the text next to the yellow icon is our prompt, and the text next to the green icon is ChatGPT’s response.”

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How To Have Political Discussions (Not Debate) In The Classroom
EdSurge - 11/7/22

“Constructive dialogue is a form of conversation in which people who have different values, beliefs and perspectives seek to build new ways to understand and interact with each other, even as they sustain commitments to their own stances. It builds opportunities for students to connect rather than argue, to understand rather than vilify, and to step into curiosity rather than judgment. Practicing constructive dialogue lends itself to developing conflict resolution skills, critical thinking and reflective thinking around ideological differences.”
On The Effect Of Computational Analysis On Culture
Atlantic - 10/30/22

“The analytics revolution, which began with the movement known as Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that were, let’s say, catastrophically successful… the quantitative revolution in culture is a living creature that consumes data and spits out homogeneity… It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games… In a world that will only become more influenced by mathematical intelligence, can we ruin culture through our attempts to perfect it?”
“What Mrs. Bailey Taught Me In A.P. History Changed My Life”
New York Times - 9/21/22

“Mrs. Bailey did more than tell us we could do it. She was not mere sunshine and encouragement. She forced us to have opinions and defend them. And she was not alone. She was part of a cadre of teachers known for genuinely trying to get us to engage with the material and ourselves. Mr. Crump had us fumbling around in Plato’s cave. Mrs. Carter taught us the art of stringing sentences together and making coherent arguments. Mrs. Miller introduced us to literature that posed the ultimate questions… Great teachers force us to wrestle with questions that have plagued philosophers, politicians, religious leaders, poets and scribes for millenniums.”
“What's Actually Being Taught In History Class”
New York Times - 8/17/22

“All of the teachers we spoke with agreed that their political beliefs should not shape classroom discussions. But their personal experiences and teaching philosophies have informed their approaches to tough subjects like identity, representation and inequality.”
Meet The Writers Using A.I. To Help Them Write Their Novels
The Verge - 7/20/22

“She’s a little embarrassed to say she’s become reliant on it. Not that she couldn’t write without it, but she thinks her writing wouldn’t be as rich, and she would certainly be more burnt out. “There’s something different about working with the AI and editing those words, and then coming up with my own and then editing it, that’s much easier. It’s less emotionally taxing. It’s less tiresome; it’s less fatiguing. I need to pay attention much less closely. I don’t get as deeply into the writing as I did before, and yet, I found a balance where I still feel very connected to the story, and I still feel it’s wholly mine.””
“168 Writing Prompts To Spark Discussion And Reflection”
New York Times - 7/13/22

“Each day of the school year we publish a Student Opinion question: an invitation for students to share their own opinions and experiences in response to New York Times stories on the news of the day. Each of these prompts is introduced with an article, interactive feature or video produced by The Times… The prompts are organized into two sections: questions that lend themselves well to persuasive writing, and questions that encourage narrative writing. We have also published a short, visual post highlighting five of the most popular questions we asked this school year.”
26 Astonishing Poems Written By A.I.
New Yorker - 6/21/22

“Dan pressed a button, and in less than a second the computer produced a poem in the style of Philip Larkin that was so much like a Philip Larkin poem, we thought it was a poem by Philip Larkin. We Googled the first line, expecting it to be an existing Philip Larkin poem, but we couldn’t find it on the Internet. It was an original work, composed by the A.I. in less time than it takes a man to sneeze.”
NYT Reflects On The 1619 Project, And How We Teach History
New York Times - 11/9/21

“The argument for 1619 as our origin point goes beyond the centrality of slavery; 1619 was also the year that a heroic and generative process commenced, one by which enslaved Africans and their free descendants would profoundly alter the direction and character of the country, having an impact on everything from politics to popular culture. “Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice a hundred years,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, and it is difficult to argue against extending his point through the century to follow, one that featured a Black civil rights struggle that transformed American democracy and the birth of numerous Black art forms that have profoundly influenced global culture. The 1619 Project made the provocative case that the start of the African presence in the English North American colonies could be considered the moment of inception of the United States of America.”
“What We Did The Last Time We Broke America”
New York Times - 10/29/21

“From the 1860s through 1900, America was embroiled in a generation-long, culturewide war over democracy, fought through the loudest, roughest, closest elections in our history. An age of acrimony when engaged, enraged participation came to seem less like a “perversion of traditional American institutions,” as one memoirist observed, and more like “their normal operation.” The partisan combat of that era politicized race, class and religion but often came down to a fundamental debate about behavior. How should Americans participate in their democracy? What was out of bounds? Were fraud, violence and voter suppression the result of bad actors, or were there certain dangerous tendencies inherent in the very idea of self-government? Was reform even possible? Ultimately, Americans decided to simmer down.”
Bridging Difference Is An Act of Feeling, Not Thought
Aeon - 8/9/21

“It’s time to give up the idea that ‘truth’ is the almighty stop-gap for justification and the hope that reasons will win out if we just find the right ones. Politically transformative work should aim to cause feelings and experiences in one’s adversaries that invite further investigation and reflection. Science, the environment, racial justice – all of these things matter because we care about them. As Nietzsche once mused, the head is merely the intestine of the heart.”
“Studying Current Events Boosts Literacy And Civic Engagement”
The 74 Million - 3/25/20

“Because the store of general knowledge we need for full language proficiency is fluid, not fixed, reading and watching the news should be a staple of the well-educated person’s knowledge and language diet. But at a time when it’s never been more important to be well-informed and literate, children have never been less likely to pay close attention.”
The Case For Minimal Standards, Lots of Reading, And Lots Of Writing
ASCD - 2/1/20

“If we want people to perform well, concision is king: the fewer the criteria, the easier it is to reinforce, practice, monitor—and thus ensure—that those criteria are fully met. When organizations establish only a tiny set of crystal-clear criteria, both performance—and job satisfaction—skyrocket. The same goes for schools. There are both historic and contemporary precedents for minimalist literacy standards which would ensure that students read and write in larger—much larger—amounts.”
An Excellent Post On Political (And Controversial) Discussions In Class
KQED - 12/3/19

“Surprise discussions sprung on students can go off the rails quickly. “If the Monday morning after the Charlottesville riots a teacher just walks into her classroom and asks the students, ‘Well, what did you guys think of that?’ That’s going to be a disaster,” McAvoy said. An open discussion right after a tragic event, with questions like “how do you feel about this situation?” or “do you have questions?” allows students to process—but it’s not the time to debate free speech, or what to do about monuments.”
How To Fight Polarization
Behavioral Scientist - 11/25/19

“When people discover that they don’t know as much as they thought they did, something interesting happens: their political attitudes become less extreme.”
An Alternative To Debate: Teach Consensus, Not Persuasion
New York Times - 10/12/19

“School debate doesn’t have to be this way, though. In fact, many schools around the country are gravitating to alternative forms of debate that set the goals of truth and understanding over the goal of persuasion… In the Ethics Bowl, created at the intercollegiate level in 1993 and the high school level around 2012, a team is assigned a question — not a statement or conclusion, as in traditional debate — on a contentious topic, such as “When is the use of military drones morally permissible?” ..The winner is the team that does the better job of articulating its reasoning, listening and responding to questions, and advancing the collective understanding of the issue at hand.”
1619 Project: The Origins, Impact, And Legacy Of Slavery In The US
New York Times - 8/14/19

"The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
McSweeney’s Calls For Stories From Young Immigrants (Any Country)
McSweeney’s - 6/1/19

“What You Need to Know About Me is a new anthology (published by The Hawkins Project, co-founded by Dave Eggers) that highlights the experiences of young people (ages 11-24) who have immigrated from one country to another… Of our contributors, we want to know: How has the experience of migration impacted your life? What have been the gifts and challenges of such a life-changing move? But most of all: What do we need to know about you?”
The Paradoxical Surge In Demand For Humanities, While Majors Decline
New York Review of Books - 4/2/19

“People like history—just look at the New York Times bestseller list—but not enough historians actually take the time to try to talk to the interested public… An obvious remedy would be to place more stress on good writing; courses on how to write for the informed laity should be central to all humanities instruction. But the humanities need a more thorough overhaul, drawing on the tools developed by the tech world to capture and convey the complex, tortured, confounding, and inspiring story of human cultures and civilization.”
NYT Invites Student Essays Connecting Their Studies To The World Today
New York Times - 12/6/18

“So you’re studying the Civil War — or Shakespeare, or evolution, or “The Bluest Eye.” Why? What does it have to do with your life and the lives of those around you? Why should you remember it once you’ve turned in that paper or taken that test?”
Tips For Fostering “Civil Dialogue” On High Pressure Topics
History Tech - 11/30/18

“How can we encourage and support conversations around controversial topics? How can we tie current events to broader topics and past events without . . . you know, setting stuff on fire and throwing desks?”
Interview With Jill Lepore About Her New Book “These Truths”
Chronicle of Higher Education - 11/13/18

“There’s an incredibly rich scholarship on the history of evidence, which traces its rise in the Middle Ages in the world of law, its migration into historical writing, and then finally into the realm that we’re most familiar with, journalism. That’s a centuries-long migration of an idea that begins in a very particular time and place, basically the rise of trial by jury starting in 1215. We have a much better vantage on the tenuousness of our own grasp of facts when we understand where facts come from. Facts have been devalued for a long time. The rise of the fact was centuries ago. Facts were replaced by numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries as the higher-status unit of knowledge. That’s the moment at which the United States is founded as a demographic democracy. Now what’s considered to be most prestigious is data. The bigger the data, the better. That transformation, from facts to numbers to data, traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing. Facts come from the realm of the humanities, numbers represent the social sciences, and data the natural sciences. When people talk about the decline of the humanities, they are actually talking about the rise and fall of the fact”
Vote: Here’s Everything You Need To Know To Vote, Anywhere In The US
ProPublica - 10/31/18

“The midterms are here. Here’s everything you need to know to hit the polls and cast an informed vote this election season.”
"The Case For Applied History”
History Today - 9/1/18

“Historians are not seers; their analogies may be misplaced and their assessments can be wrong. Yet the idea of history constituting a valuable guide for present and future action was an established part of western culture. This makes sense. After all, the past is our sole repository of information about what works and what does not; we have nothing else to draw upon. In our everyday lives we constantly make decisions based on past experience. While two situations may not be perfectly alike, nevertheless we divine patterns and lessons in the past that can help us to make better choices. In recent decades, however, things have changed.”
How To Have Better Arguments
The Better Arguments Project - 3/19/18

“Across the country, citizen-led efforts are underway that attempt to bridge the divides created or unearthed by the… presidential election. These efforts are admirable. Done wrong, however, these efforts have the potential to compound our political problems rather than ameliorate them. Profound philosophical divides with deep historical roots exist across the country about the role of government, the job of citizens, how to deal with the economy, and what it truly means to be American. Instead of papering over these differences, we need to understand their origins, grow smarter about engaging them, learn to ask better questions, and get better at arguing with one other about them.”
Danah boyd: Critical Thinking Can’t Solve Everything [video]
SXSWedu/YouTube - 3/7/18

“No matter what worldview or way of knowing someone holds dear, they always believe that they are engaging in critical thinking when they’re developing a sense of right and wrong… Much of what they conclude may be rooted in the way of knowing more than any specific source of information. That’s true for all of us. If we're not careful, media literacy and critical thinking will simply be deployed in the classroom as an assertion of authority over epistemology. Right now, the conversation about fact-checking has already devolved to suggest that there is only one truth.”
On The Challenge Of Teaching The “Hard History” Of Slavery
NPR - 2/4/18

"How many students chose slavery as the reason the South seceded? Eight percent… Textbooks and teachers tend to accentuate the positive, focusing on heroes like Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass without also giving students the full, painful context of slavery.”
NYT Synthesizes Student Essays On How They Feel About News
New York Times - 2/1/18

"To participate, students had to complete three tasks: 1. Do a personal 24- to 48-hour news audit in which you record all the news you get now, where it comes from and how well it meets your needs and interests. 2. Change your “news diet” to make it better meet your needs. Tinker with sources, content and platforms to address what you discovered in your news audit. 3. In a personal essay (500 words or fewer) or video (one minute or shorter), reflect on your experiences before and after you experimented with your news diet, and sum up how you see the role of news in your life now.”
First Translation Of The Odyssey Into English By A Woman
New York Times - 11/2/17

"I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker.”
A Surprising Provocation Against—And For—The Humanities
American Affairs - 11/1/17

"The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve.”
How Fact Checkers Evaluate Sources Differently Than Historians
Stanford - 10/24/17

"The fact checkers read laterally, meaning they would quickly scan a website in question but then open a series of additional browser tabs, seeking context and perspective from other sites. In contrast, the authors write, historians and students read vertically, meaning they would stay within the original website in question to evaluate its reliability.”
"The Dying Art Of Disagreement”
New York Times - 9/24/17

"In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.”
Teenagers Respond: What Defines American Values? [Video]
New York Times - 8/23/17

“"What are your values as a person? What are American values? Do you think the country is living up to those values today? Why or why not?”… I wrote to dozens of teenagers — young people I’d met at protests, young Republicans I’d talked to around Election Day, teenagers who were already vlogging about their high school experiences on YouTube. I also reached out to Christian youth groups, home-schooling associations, L.G.B.T. rights organizations, groups representing Native American youth and many other organizations, asking them to recommend young people who might want to participate.
Clear Thinking And Clear Writing: The Purpose Of The Humanities
New York Times - 6/23/17

"Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as the knowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn’t merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you. No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will.”
The Cognitive Magic Of Shakespearean Wordplay
Nautilus - 5/25/17

"His theory may explain the ineffable mind-states that poetry creates in us: poetic experience as the interaction of barely perceptible mental processes whose delicate, scintillating play is usually washed out by the spotlight of conscious attention.”
Shakespeare, Text Analysis, And The End Of Sole Authorship?
Literary Hub - 4/5/17

"The author is sacred, singular, reified. There is something monotheistic about this idea of the single author-creator; there is something of the primacy of the individual one may see in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. We write our own work, of course, but writing, and art more broadly, is often collaborative at some level: our all-too-often-unacknowledged editors, our readers who make substantial suggestions, the writers we channel or even borrow from.”
Garrison Keillor Shares How To Write Poetry [Humor-ish]
Washington Post - 3/28/17

“Love is never easy to express… But you can do it. The first step is: Imitate. Google “great love poems” and find one you like a lot and copy and paste it onto a blank page — Burns’s “My love is like a red, red rose” or Stevenson’s “I will make you brooches and toys for your delight” or Yeats’s “Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye” — and simply change the nouns, e.g. “My love is like a double bed” or “a trip to town,” “a vision pure,” “a red T-shirt”; “I will make you coffee and serve by candlelight”; “I come in the front door and love comes down from upstairs” — and then go on to plug in new verbs and adverbs, prepositions. It’s like remodeling an old house.”
How To Foster Civic Competence And Responsibility
Quartz - 1/23/17

"To holistically prepare this new generation for life in an open society, what’s needed is a new model for high-school civics; one that integrates American history and government, critical thinking, media literacy, and digital literacy. The goal of such education should not be merely to instill understanding of our online civic landscape, but how to navigate and participate in it in constructive and meaningful ways: Not what to think, but how to think.”
The Surprisingly Long History Of Fake News
Politico - 12/18/16

"To whip up revolutionary fervor, Ben Franklin himself concocted propaganda stories about murderous “scalping” Indians working in league with the British King George III. Other revolutionary leaders published fake propaganda stories that King George was sending thousands of foreign soldiers to slaughter the American patriots and turn the tide of the War of Independence to get people to enlist and support the revolutionary cause. By the 1800s, fake news was back again, swirling around questions of race. Like Jewish blood libel, American racial sentiments and fears were powerful in producing false stories. One persistent “cottage industry” of fake news in antebellum America was stories of African-Americans spontaneously turning white.”
Understanding The Humanities In An Age Of STEM
Harvard Magazine - 11/21/16

"For Rudenstine, humanistic study is recursive, marked by a passionate recidivism: it sends us back, time and again, to the “humanistic object,” the song or play or poem that begs to be reinterpreted, to be experienced once more. “We look to the humanities to provide us with illuminating works to which we can return passionately in the hope of discovering new insights, new ideas, and new knowledge.” This sense of recurrent contact is at the root of the humanities’ appeal, and their ability to enrich our lives, according to Rudenstine. More than any other sphere of knowledge, they are better at bringing us closer to the “texture and flux” of human experience.”
Tips For Teaching The 2016 Election
Harvard Graduate School of Education - 9/14/16

"As the school year takes off and the election draws nearer, rejecting political conversations in the classroom will likely be impossible — and unwise, according to educators we interviewed… Still, the 2016 election, fraught with divisive language and widespread dislike of both candidates, is tricky. For civics educators, talking about the election may require a different approach than they’ve taken in previous years.”
"How To Think Like Shakespeare”: A Delightful Essay On Education
Chronicle of Higher Education - 8/29/16

"In short, the best way for you to prepare for the unforeseen future is to learn how to think intensively and imaginatively… You should think of yourself as apprenticing to the craft of thought… As with rhetoric, imitation, and inventory, you might not think very highly of apprenticeship these days. But it was crucial for skilled labor in Renaissance Europe. It required an exacting, collaborative environment, with guidance from people who knew more than you did. When Shakespeare arrived on the London theater scene, he entered a kind of artistic studio, or workshop, or laboratory, in which he was apprenticing himself to experienced playwrights. Note that playwright is not spelled w-r-i-t-e; it’s spelled w-r-i-g-h-t: a maker.”
Greater Empathy? Literary Fiction Readers Read Emotion Better
Guardian - 8/23/16

"What we are saying is that there are different ways of telling a story, and they have different impacts on the way we perceive social reality. Literary fiction, we say, tends to challenge social categories – the characters are category-resistant … Popular fiction, on the other hand, uses types of characters which help us immediately understand what is going on. That’s how we learn about the social world – how we build our national and cultural identities.”
"Data Mining Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling”
MIT Technology Review - 7/6/16

"The idea behind sentiment analysis is that words have a positive or negative emotional impact. So words can be a measure of the emotional valence of the text and how it changes from moment to moment. So measuring the shape of the story arc is simply a question of assessing the emotional polarity of a story at each instant and how it changes.”
Analyze and Visualize Rhyme and Assonance (via “Hamilton”)
Wall Street Journal - 6/6/16

"Let's start with the first verse of the musical's opening number. Our algorithm breaks words into their component sounds and then groups similar-sounding syllables into rhyme families, which are color-coded… Now it's your turn. Paste in English lyrics, poetry or text and our algorithm will try to highlight similar-sounding syllables to reveal rhymes and repetitions.”
On Teaching And Mentoring Students: A Literary Reflection
Literary Hub - 4/14/16

"These questions are what I chase in my days with [my students], and it often takes bouts of frustration and resultant late-night preps to remind me why I’m here—not to teach English or poetry, but to teach [students]. Thank God I have these conduits of literature that constrain me in my yearning to open up the light behind their eyes that seems to be shielded—pains from growing, pains from first loves and first losses, pains from home, pains from our expectations, and pains from the pressure that they must have this mess called life figured out.”
The Case For Emotion And Empathy As Part Of The Curriculum
Atlantic - 4/5/16

“Yet while such a unit may be rigorous intellectually, it is arguably incomplete unless students tangle with the book’s emotional core… Standards rarely address it; administrators rarely explicitly encourage it; few people pay consultants to give presentations on it at staff meetings. To do the work mandated by the Common Core well (which, for a good English teacher, is nothing particularly new), it may be helpful. To make students kinder and more conscientious citizens, it’s perhaps imperative.”
What Happens When History Is Recorded Digitally?
Washington Post - 3/25/16

"We’re now in the midst of the most far-reaching shift in media ever, as we rush to replace all manner of physical media with digital alternatives. The benefits are compelling. We’ve gained instant access to a seemingly infinite store of information. But there are losses, too. “Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile,” Rumsey reports, “limitless in scope yet inherently unstable.” All media are subject to decay, of course. Clay cracks, paper crumbles. What’s different now is that our cultural memory is embedded in a complex and ever-shifting system of technologies. Any change in the system can render the record unreadable.”
The Humanities As Gateway To—Necessity For—A Life Well Lived
New York Times - 2/23/16

"The regime of information may well sport its specific truths, but it is locked out of the associations — subjective but also moral and philosophical — that bathe all literature… Art not only brings us news from the “interior,” but it points to future knowledge. A humanistic education is not about memorizing poems or knowing when X wrote Y, and what Z had to say about it. It is, instead, about the human record that is available to us in libraries and museums and theaters and, yes, online. But that record lives and breathes; it is not calculable or teachable via numbers or bullet points. Instead, it requires something that we never fail to do before buying clothes: Trying the garment on.”
A History Of The Purported Decline Of The Humanities
Aeon - 12/17/15

"By the early 1970s, the significance of these non-economic returns to higher education was recognised across the OECD, highlighting the futility of ‘manpower planning’. As the OECD put it, students had their own ideas of what to study. This student demand was a natural expression of contemporary ideas of democratisation, widening participation, and the emerging value structure of the new student generation, comprising goals such as ‘self-fulfillment’, ‘quality of life’ and ‘individual development’.”
Even Business Schools Are Affirming the Importance Of Humanities
Harvard Business School - 6/24/15

“We cannot march boldly into the future without demanding rapid advancement, too, in the faculties required to preserve our human dignity in a world of [artificial superintelligence]. Our capacities for ethical decision-making, compassion, and creativity must also grow, along with our intellectual capabilities to deepen our understanding of the human need for connection, accomplishment, and meaning.”
SNHU’s Paul LeBlanc On Competency-Based Learning (and More)
Chronicle of Higher Education - 5/27/15

“The credit hour is very good at telling us how long people have sat, not so good at telling us what they've actually learned. And in that model, time is pretty fixed… What they learn is variable… You flip that in a competency-based model. What happens is that learning becomes fixed and non-negotiable, and time becomes the variable.”
Existential Emails Explaining Class Absence [Humor]
Synapse - 4/27/15

"Can’t make it. Sorry this is last-minute. Every minute is the last. — Pamela”
An Ode to Writing
New Yorker - 3/11/15

"Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent. Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose.”
We Don’t Need More STEM. We Need More STEM + Liberal Arts.
Washington Post - 2/18/15

"Many in government and business publicly question the value of [a liberal arts] education. Yet employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world. They like my chemistry grads because not only can they find their way around a laboratory, but they’re also nimble thinkers who know to consider chemistry’s impact on society and the environment.“
We Are Disrupted. (It’s True.) But Humanism Is Not Obsolete.
New York Times - 1/7/15

"Soon all the collections in all the libraries and all the archives in the world will be available to everyone with a screen. Who would not welcome such a vast enfranchisement? But universal accessibility is not the end of the story, it is the beginning. The humanistic methods that were practiced before digitalization will be even more urgent after digitalization, because we will need help in navigating the unprecedented welter… Patterns that are revealed by searches will not identify their own causes and reasons. The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation.”
Andrew Stanton (Pixar) On What Makes Good Stories
Farnam Street - 11/30/14

“Storytelling … [is] knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you’re saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings.”
Are We Losing Sight of the Ideas That Shaped the Humanities?
Chronicle of Higher Education - 11/21/14

“We have shifted our focus from the meaning of ideas to the means by which they’re produced. The same questions that always intrigued us—What is justice? What is the good life? What is morally valid? What is free will?—take a back seat to the biases embedded in our neural circuitry. Instead of grappling with the gods, we seem to be more interested in the topography of Mt. Olympus.”
The New Republic/Ivies Flap Isn’t Really About Ivies
New Yorker - 8/5/14

“In the background of an essay like “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League”—and of essays like “No Time to Think” or “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” both published in the Times—is the looming presence of the arrhythmic, unreassuring modern world, which seems always to be speeding things up in a senseless way. Modernity is the sort of problem that’s both very old and very new.”
The Challenge of Teaching WWI (and History) in Modern Times
LA Times - 6/21/14

“I doubt that understanding the Great War will help young people "compete in the global economy." In fact, insight into that war's causes might lead kids to rethink entirely international competition as an educational goal. Yet I believe that wrestling with that war's complexity will make for better citizens: thoughtful, cautious about letting a president take us to war, concerned with the "collateral damage" inherent to modern conflict, and able to consign Nazis to their proper historical place.”
A History of Race, A Definition of Racism, And How to Write History
Five Books - 5/20/14

“Racism is a prejudice... coupled with discriminatory action. It’s a very simple definition, it took me a long time to arrive at it, but it is composed of these two parts. You need to have prejudices concerning a certain group of human beings — to whom you attribute mental and physical features reproduced from generation to generation — coupled with discriminatory action. If you have only prejudices, you don’t have racism.”
A Short History of Shakespeare’s Prominence in America
New York Times - 3/19/14

“You have John Quincy Adams on Desdemona having sex with Othello, Lincoln reading ‘Macbeth,’ and another president, Grant, rehearsing the role of Desdemona at a military camp. You couldn’t make this stuff up. This is how central a preoccupation Shakespeare was at the time.”
Explaining Art With Science Butchers Both.
New Republic - 1/18/14

“Physics can explain chemistry, which can explain biology, which can explain psychology, and psychology might someday tell us, at least in the most general terms, how we create art and why we respond to it. But it will never account for the texture, the particularities, of individual works, or tell us what they mean. Art is experiential. It doesn’t just speak of experience; it needs to be experienced itself.
We Shouldn’t Complain About Losing the Great Books
Slate - 1/7/14

“Not everybody likes Chaucer enough to spend 15 weeks on him, and that’s OK.”
What an Evolving Humanities Program Might Look Like
Works Cited - 1/4/14

“Humanities research constantly crosses in and out of the academy, and it’s so much a part of everyday life that most of the time we don’t even bother to think of it as ‘humanities.’”
We Are Losing Our Connection To Great Books
Wall Street Journal - 1/3/14

“This constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present would become a defining feature of Western Civilization.”
Fish: Chomsky and a Paean to Academia, Scholarship and Intellect
New York Times - 12/9/13

“Yes, I said to myself, this is what we do; we think about problems and puzzles and try to advance the understanding of them.”

humanities

Basic Civics Tests Do Not Boost Voting Habits
EdWeek - 9/20/23
All This Great Writing About “Goodnight, Moon”
Literary Hub - 9/7/23
Some New Statistical Analyses Of Word Use In Shakespeare
The Conversation - 9/6/23
America, Empire, And The Rise And Fall Of Rome
New York Times - 9/4/23
A Fascinating Geopolitical Long History Of Ukraine
Uncharted Territories - 8/29/23

“Ukraine is lucky enough to have some of the best land in the world: It’s fertile, with flat plains, sufficient rain, rivers for agriculture and silt, and chernozem, the most fertile soil in the world. It’s perfect for trade, with rivers for north-south exchange, flat steppes for east-west trade, and access to the sea for trade with the Mediterranean and the rest of the world… Why Is Ukraine Not a Global Superpower?”

View remaining articles (745)

This Week In History: Phillis Wheatley Becomes First Black American To Publish A Poetry Collection
Literary Hub - 8/27/23
“What Can Literature Teach Us About Forgiveness?”
New York Times - 8/24/23
Greta Gerwig, Paradise Lost, And Barbie
Literary Hub - 8/23/23

“That Gerwig is thinking about Milton’s radical retelling of the Book of Genesis should come as no surprise.”
Hip-Hop Turns 50: Is Hip-Hop America’s Poetry?
New York Times - 8/22/23
Meta-Analysis Finds Trigger Warnings Increase Anxiety; No Effect On Affective Response
SagePub - 8/18/23

“Existing published research almost unanimously suggests that trigger warnings do not mitigate distress… In contrast to the claims of both advocates and critics, we found that trigger warnings did not seem to increase the avoidance of warned-of material… We found that trigger warnings reliably increased anticipatory anxiety about upcoming content, consistent with the concerns of critics… Last, we found that warnings had little to no effect on the comprehension of warned material.”
Some First Day Of School Activities For Social Studies
History Tech - 8/14/23
“Make Shakespeare Dirty Again”
New York Times - 8/13/23
Three Reflections On Harari’s “Sapiens”
Renegade Intellectual - 8/11/23
“Why Read John Milton?”
The Millions - 8/3/23

“What draws me to Milton is the language—those gorgeous, labyrinthine, serpentine sentences which unspool across dozens of enjambed lines.”
The “Oldest Named Poet”, A Sumerian Woman, Writes Of Change
Aeon - 7/28/23

“Enheduana does not offer clear answers to these questions, and I would not hold her up as a model for good living in difficult times. But her poems fascinate me in part because they describe, with dazzling intensity, a world where change is the norm. These are poems from, and about, unstable times. That is one reason I am drawn to them: I want to understand what it means to live in such a world, because I will probably have to.”
Is The Arrival Of A.I. Another Oppenheimer Moment?
New York Times - 7/25/23

“We have now arrived at a similar crossroads in the science of computing, a crossroads that connects engineering and ethics, where we will again have to choose whether to proceed with the development of a technology whose power and potential we do not yet fully apprehend… It was the raw power and strategic potential of the bomb that prompted their call to action then. It is the far less visible but equally significant capabilities of these newest artificial intelligence technologies that should prompt swift action now.”
Ken Jennings Offers Travel Guide Tour Of Milton’s Heaven
Literary Hub - 7/20/23
Why Is Polarization Growing? What Are The Implications?
New York Times - 7/19/23
Priest Reflects On The Power Of Poetry
New York Times - 7/16/23
NYT Op-Doc On Video NPC’s And What They Say About Labor Today
New York Times - 7/11/23
Why Does Storytelling Have Such Power Over Us?
New Yorker - 7/3/23
Jill Lepore, Constitutional Amendments, And The Need For Ongoing Change
New York Times - 7/1/23

“A written constitution ratified by the people — and subject to amendment by the people — is an American invention. In the 18th century, people who drafted constitutions and commented on constitutionalism came to agree that if such a strange, new and fragile thing as a written constitution were to endure, it would, as time passed, need to be both repaired and improved, mended and amended. To amend meant, at the time, to correct a fault; to repair an omission; to fix what’s broken; or to improve, in a moral sense: to make something better. The word shares a root, four of its five letters, and almost the entirety of its meaning, with the verb “mend.””
Is The True Threat Of A.I. How It Will Weaken Human Institutions?
New York Times - 6/30/23

“But human intelligence is as much a product of policies and institutions as it is of genes and individual aptitudes. It’s easier to be smart on a fellowship in the Library of Congress than while working several jobs in a place without a bookstore or even decent Wi-Fi. It doesn’t seem all that controversial to suggest that more scholarships and public libraries will do wonders for boosting human intelligence. But for the solutionist crowd in Silicon Valley, augmenting intelligence is primarily a technological problem — hence the excitement about A.G.I.”
“What's The Difference Between Nationalism And Patriotism?”
The Conversation - 6/28/23
On The Decorative Book Business (See: Gatsby)
New York Times - 4/28/23
Shakespeare Integrated Contemporary Mathematics Into His Work
The Conversation - 4/20/23
Jill Lepore On Data, Mysteries, Facts, and Numbers
New Yorker - 3/27/23
On 150 Years Of Innovation, Standard Of Living Improvements, And Schools
Larry Cuban - 3/17/23

“The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition… … economic growth since 1970 has been simultaneously dazzling and disappointing. This paradox is resolved when we recognize that advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information.”
COVID Poetry: An Emerging Genre?
The Conversation - 3/9/23
"Building A New Canon Of Black Literature”
New York Times - 3/3/23
“On The Evolution Of The World’s Oldest Encyclopedia”
Literary Hub - 3/1/23

“Galaxy: In astronomy, that long, white, luminous track which seems to encompass the heavens like a swath, scarf or girdle, and which is easily perceived in a clear night, especially when the moon does not appear. The Greeks call it Galaxy of Milk on account of its colour and appearance; the Latins, for the same reasons, call it via lactea; and we, the milky way.”
Where C. S. Lewis Met J. R. R. Tolkien
New York Times - 2/28/23
Breaking Down The Roots Of The War In Ukraine
New York Times - 2/27/23
On How Linguistic Diversity In Fiction Highlights Cultural Diversity
The Conversation - 2/23/23
Henry Louis Gates Jr. On Teaching African American History
New York Times - 2/17/23
“Radical Idea: Redraw The U.S. Map As A Nation Of City-States”
Big Think - 2/5/23
“The Books That Made The European Enlightenment”
The Critic - 2/1/23
"Henry Louis Gates, Jr On What Makes A Classic African American Text”
Literary Hub - 1/31/23
Jane Austen Continues To Draw New Fans
Guardian - 1/29/23
The Wife Of Bath: “The First Ordinary Woman In English Literature”
Lapham’s Quarterly - 1/25/23
On How The Practice Of Literary Criticism Has Changed
New Yorker - 1/16/23

“If “Cultural Capital” was a sociology of judgment, then “Professing Criticism” is a sociology of criticism, an argument about how, during the twentieth century, the practice evolved from a wide-ranging amateur pursuit, requiring no specialist training or qualifications, into a profession and a discipline housed within the academy.”
Six Long Novels “That Live Up To Their Reputation”
Atlantic - 12/18/22
“Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?” (Real Or Fictional)
Stanford - 12/7/22
Americans Disagree Less Than People Think On How History Should Be Taught
EdWeek - 12/7/22

“Many Republicans believe most Democrats want to teach a history defined by shameful oppression and white guilt. Many Democrats believe most Republicans want to focus on the white majority and overlook slavery and racism. But we found that both impressions are wrong.”
On Handling Criticism Of Contemporary History And Social Studies Classes
NCSS - 12/2/22
Rare Recording Found Of Musical By 18-Year Old Stephen Sondheim
NPR - 12/2/22
On The History Of Literary Studies
London Review Of Books - 12/1/22
On Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves To Death”
ArtsJournal - 11/25/22

“Were you outraged during the Trump years and spent hours every day following every little scandal and transgression? For what purpose? After, say, the first dozen or so outrages, did subsequent scandal change your opinion about the man? Did additional information shape new actions, new responses on your part that made a difference in either stopping him or changing the situation? You gave money, sure. You voted, sure. But think about the possibly thousands of hours you wasted in being outraged. And to what purpose? This was Postman’s point. The “news” as reported on television was about things its viewers would be unable to impact, so why be informed about it?”
On Bringing The World Cup Into English Class
EdSurge - 11/23/22
Cross-Cultural Differences In Graphic Novel Illustration
Taylor & Francis - 11/22/22
On Helping Students Master The Sequence Of Events In Hamlet
Julian Girdham - 11/22/22
On Reading Old Books
Washington Post - 11/18/22
A Visually Stunning Essay On “The Visions Of Octavia Butler”
New York Times - 11/17/22
Brilliant, Interactive Visualization Of The Globe’s 8 Billion People
Washington Post - 11/15/22
Are Nations Prisoners Of Their Geography?
Guardian - 11/10/22
“Culturally Responsive Ways To Teach The History Of Thanksgiving”
Edutopia - 11/4/22
On Aesthetics And Moral Value
Aeon - 11/1/22
On Multiverse Narratives — And Our Urgent Need For The Present
New Yorker - 10/31/22

“The garden of forking paths cannot continue to fork forever, if we are to find meaning there. Multiverses speak to the part of us that wants every option to be open, that wants the journey to go on and on. Of course, no journey really does—and at the end of many multiversal stories the tangle of time lines resolves into one, or a traveller finally arrives at the right version of history and decides to stay. Such endings seem to invite us to return to our one life, on our one planet, with some added spark of hope or curiosity or resolve. They speak to the part of us that wants, like Evelyn and Lyra and so many versions of Spider-Man, to go home.”
“The Waste Land” Has Origins In Sanskrit
Literary Hub - 10/24/22
On The Canon, Humanities, Liberal Education, And Freedom
The Point - 10/18/22
“The Oldest Surviving Books In The Americas”
New York Times - 10/17/22
“What Changes Kids’ Minds About Poetry?”
Middle Web - 10/9/22
Resources For Finding Histories Of Marginalized Peoples
Cult of Pedagogy - 10/4/22
“How to Teach with Shakespeare: James Baldwin, the Liberal Arts, and the Progymnasmata”
Brigham Young University - 10/1/22
“TextPlay”: A Drama Told Through Text Messages
New York Times - 9/30/22
Avoid Controversy By Teaching The Conflict, Not The Controversy
Literary Hub - 9/19/22
“A Crisis Coming: The Twin Threats To Democracy”
New York Times - 9/17/22
Before There Was Hamilton, There Was “1776”
History Tech - 9/16/22

“At the time it debuted, just a few years before America’s bicentennial, it was considered groundbreaking in the way it depicted the Founding Fathers as three dimensional, flawed, and interesting people rather than stereotyped cutouts.”
“The Real Warriors Behind ‘The Woman King’”
Smithsonian - 9/15/22
Secret Kabul Book Club For Girls Finds Inspiration In Anne Frank
NPR - 9/11/22
Exploring Thoreau’s “Walden” In A Stunning Video Game
Edutopia - 9/7/22
A History Of The Encyclopedia Brittanica
Spectator - 9/3/22
Digital Humanities: Does Quantification Belong In Historical Understanding?
Aeon - 9/2/22
“Prebunking” - Can You Inoculate People to Misinformation?
Nieman Lab - 8/25/22
Is An Overabundance Of History Making Truth More Difficult?
New York Times - 8/25/22
More On Inoculating People Against Misinformation
New York Times - 8/24/22
How Should We Feel About Holden Caulfield?
Vulture - 8/23/22
On Using Print Magazines In English Class
Edutopia - 8/18/22
More On “Longtermism” - Should We Value The Future More Than The Present?
Boston Review - 8/15/22
"How Teens Are Pushing Back On Book Bans”
Next City - 8/10/22
David McCullough, 89
AP - 8/9/22
Remembering Howard Zinn On What Would Be His 100th Birthday
Rethinking Schools - 8/8/22
Marvel Comics Become Penguin Classics
Atlantic - 7/27/22
Graphic Novel Found - From World War I
Arts Hub - 7/22/22
On How Video Games Tell Stories
Literary Hub - 7/20/22
How A Music Professor Explored The Authorship Of Renaissance Works
Stanford - 7/18/22
Ada Limón Is The Next US Poet Laureate
New York Times - 7/12/22
Reading Literary Fiction Leads To A More Complex World View
Literary Hub - 7/8/22

“Interestingly, the finding was specific to literary fiction as a genre. In fact, the authors found that “early-life reading of narrative fiction that presents more standardized plots and characters, such as romance novels, predict holding a less complex worldview.” …The key to a complex worldview, the authors argue, is not exactly about empathy, as other studies would have it, but about internalizing the concept of difference.”
“Marilyn The Poet”
The Paris Review - 6/28/22
Everything You Wanted To Know About: “The Lottery” By Shirley Jackson
Literary Hub - 6/26/22
Deliberative Democracy: How To Build Bridges Across Big Differences [Video]
Stanford - 6/24/22

“What we’ve discovered is that moderated small-group discussion with a prepared agenda of vetted, balanced materials where you get the best arguments on either side on a. Policy proposal, and people are incentivized to listen to each other and take their turns and then have a civil discussion, over a period of time, usually a weekend… there are some astonishing changes of opinion that result. And there are some lasting effects as people encounter others who are very different from themselves… and they see the merit in what other people are trying to do.”
“EmilyBlaster” - An ‘80s Style Video Game Made From Emily Dickinson’s Poems
Smithsonian - 6/24/22
Visualizing The World’s Most Popular Religions
Visual Capitalist - 6/20/22
On The Role of Conflict In the Democratic Process
Aeon - 6/13/22

“The way that realistic conflict functions in democratic life is that it can eliminate exclusions, hone and develop positions for the group, and bring about the change to individuals that makes them suited for living among each other. Excluding conflict from democratic life, then, not only risks giving into authoritarian tendencies to exclude, expel or annihilate, but also fails to recognise the subjective changes that are part of participation in democratic life.”
“Could The Greatest Works Of Literature Be Undiscovered?”
Guardian - 5/30/22
In Defense Of “Happily Ever After”
Literary Hub - 5/26/22
On Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum
New Yorker - 5/18/22
On Video Games As A Tool For Exploring History
The Conversation - 2/14/22
How Marshall McLuhan Sparked Today’s Media Crisis
Quilette - 1/18/22

“McLuhan shared with the Boomers a longing for something better than the imperfect version of truth found in the newspapers and on the TV screens of the 1950s and ’60s. An unforeseen consequence is that, 60 years later, we live in a divided society. Rival tribes, sealed in their own bubbles of information and certainty, are today unable to talk to each other. Climate change believers and climate change deniers, pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, Democrats and Republicans all trade insults, abuse, and threats on social media. Each tribe has its own journalism and its own preferred set of narratives. Each rejects the journalism of the other as misinformation, fake news, lies, or hate speech. McLuhan’s search for perfection did not turn out quite the way he envisaged. What grew out of the rubble of the old journalism was not a garden of beautiful flowers, but a tangle of thorny weeds bearing a harvest of bitter fruit.”
Historical Precedent: The Wilmington Insurrection Of 1898
Literary Hub - 12/1/21
Vocabulary Lists Should Offer The Language Of The Discipline (Via Lit Analysis)
Edutopia - 12/1/21
“The Algorithm That Could Take Us Inside Shakespeare’s Mind”
NewYork Times - 11/24/21
Zadie Smith Rewrites Chaucer’s Wife of Bath For The Modern Stage
New York Times - 11/12/21
Can Large Societies Self-Govern?
New Yorker - 11/8/21
6 Different Perspectives/Narratives On Globalism
Aeon - 11/4/21
“Why Do We Keep Reading The Great Gatsby?”
The Paris Review - 11/1/21
Teachers: Share With The NYT “How Are You Explaining The Riot?”
New York Times - 11/1/21
Patrick Stewart Reflects On The English Teacher Who Introduced Him To Shakespeare
Guardian - 10/13/21
Visualizing: Where Are The World’s Ongoing Conflicts?
Visual Capitalist - 10/4/21
Five Principles For Using Primary Sources
History Tech - 10/4/21
Technology Is Moving Faster Than Our Ability To Understand It
Atlantic - 9/5/21
“Why Poetry Is So Crucial Right Now”
New York Times - 8/29/21
The Incoherence Of The Early Years Of America
New Republic - 8/24/21
“The” Creepiest Word In Macbeth - According To Data Analysis
Medium - 8/11/21
“What Should We Call The Sixth Of January?”
New Yorker - 8/1/21
On Student Discussions Of Sensitive Topics: Keep Your Own Views Private
Edutopia - 6/4/21
Reflection On The Power Of Oratory And Speeches
Literary Hub - 6/1/21
Atlas Obscura Rewrites Its Work To Decolonize Its Travel Narratives
New York Times - 5/30/21
Rilke’s “Letters To A Young Poet”… Now The Young Poet’s Letters Are Published
New Yorker - 5/26/21
Extraordinary Visualization Of The Tulsa Race Massacre
New York Times - 5/24/21
Four Questions To Answer In (Any?) History Class
4QM Teaching - 5/20/21
“Key Events In U.S. History That Defined Generations”
Visual Capitalist - 5/7/21
On Teaching The Works Of Living Poets
KQED - 5/3/21
“Data Is Not The Enemy Of The Humanities” - On Digital Humanities
Chronicle of Higher Education - 4/29/21
On Milman Parry, The Young Scholar Who Realized Homer Was Singing, Not Writing
Literary Hub - 4/28/21
COVID Makes The Case That The Humanities Should Be Part Of Medical School
New York Times - 4/10/21

“Some humanistic disciplines, like history and philosophy, have long had a foothold in medical education through the fields of social medicine, the history of medicine and biomedical ethics. Penn State’s College of Medicine established the first humanities department within a medical school in 1967. In recent decades, the institutional growth of the medical humanities has accelerated.”
More From Forbes On The Value Of The Humanities
Forbes - 4/6/21
“The Case Against Shakespeare”
The Walrus - 3/31/21

“Although I think Shakespeare’s plays should be curtailed, students shouldn’t totally miss out. Managing a work is something they can be proud of, and it gives them a taste of one of the finest writers in the language. But I’d save it for their senior year, when they have more under their belts.”
A Meditation On The Loss Of Place (Via Shakespeare) Since Moving Online
Dallas News - 3/28/21

“Arendt’s imagined scenario reminds me of a scene in “The Tempest,” where Ariel deceives the shipwrecked crew with a mirage-like banquet on a table before making the banquet vanish. It’s “a quaint device,” as the Folio’s stage directions term it; a trick. But the trick exposes how vulnerable we feel without something in common between us: a book, a stage, a table, a classroom, a sanctuary all provide what philosopher Ivan Illich called “tools for conviviality.” They sustain a focal point for practiced attention, where making of the highest human kind can take place.”
Who Inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Amateur Scholar Finds Out.
Boston Globe - 3/19/21
On The Relevance Of Milton’s Poetry To Today’s Political Landscape
Yale - 3/17/21
15 Minute Documentary About Being An ICU Nurse During COVID
New York Times - 2/24/21

“A short film offering a firsthand perspective of the brutality of the pandemic inside a Covid-19 I.C.U.”
A Meditation On How We Experience Time
Psyche - 2/24/21
How Different Administrations Use Language To Frame Issues
New York Times - 2/24/21
If Literature Is A Technology, Should It Be Taught Like One?
Nautilus - 2/24/21
On Novels, The Enlightenment, And Empathy
Literary Hub - 2/23/21
“Tom Stoppard’s Charmed And Haunted Life”
New Yorker - 2/22/21
"What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Empathy”
Wall Street Journal - 2/13/21
Picture Books That Bring Middle East And North African Culture To K-6 Classrooms
National Council for the Social Studies - 2/1/21
“How David Duchovny Became An Accomplished Novelist”
Wall Street Journal - 1/29/21
A Wonderful (!) Multimedia Examination Of The History Of Collage
New York Times - 1/29/21
On Social Media, And How The Internet Is Changing The Novel
Guardian - 1/23/21
On Amanda Gorman’s Writing And Performance
CNBC - 1/21/21

“I close my eyes and I say, ‘I am the daughter of Black writers. We are descended from freedom fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.’”
Lesson Plan Options For Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”
New York Times - 1/20/21

“In this lesson, students learn about the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history and consider her work as part of a tradition of occasional poetry.”
More Lesson Plan Options For Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”
PBS - 1/19/21

“Students will be able to… Write a reply or response in the spirit of Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb.” Draw connections between the moment in history, the poet’s messages and students’ own lives.”
How Different Media Are Describing The Incident At The Capital
Visual Capitalist - 1/16/21
“Now Is A Good Time To Talk To Kids About Civics”
NPR - 1/15/21
Three Lenses Through Which To Teach The Inauguration
K12 Dive - 1/13/21
‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ And Dozens Of Other Texts Are Now Public Domain
NPR - 1/1/21
Hong Kong Press Now Uses China’s Language (Via Statistical Analysis)
Quartz - 12/16/20
“24 Primary Source Archives You Might Have Missed”
History Tech - 12/14/20
A Top 20 African Books List For 2020
African Arguments - 12/10/20
A Curmudgeonly Argument For The Humanities
Justin E. H. Smith - 12/5/20

“Here is why I actually think humanistic inquiry should be defended: because it elevates the human spirit. Nothing is interesting or uninteresting in itself in a pre-given way. What is of interest in studying a humanistic object is not only the object, but the character of the relation that emerges between that object and oneself. What emerges from humanistic inquiry is thus best understood as an I-Thou relation, rather than an I-It relation.”
30 Cartoons About Literature And Literary Classics
Bored Panda - 12/1/20
On The Evolution Of Fantasy Lit: From Tolkien To Pullman To The World
Aeon - 11/30/20
The NYT Describes How To Put Headlines On Elections
New York Times - 11/21/20
Adichie Reviews Obama’s “A Promised Land”
New York Times - 11/12/20
On The Ongoing Revisionist Depictions Of Abraham Lincoln
New Yorker - 9/21/20
Beowulf “…With Feminism And Social Media Slang”
New Yorker - 8/24/20

“Headley, a novelist known primarily for her works of fantasy for young adults, is the most recent of the dozens of modern English translators who have taken on the poem, which runs three thousand one hundred and eighty-two lines long.”
“Five Perspectives On Race And Shakespeare” Via The Public Theater
Literary Hub - 8/14/20

“On August 14th, PBS is running an encore national broadcast of the Public Theater’s Much Ado About Nothing from last summer. It features an all-Black cast in New York City’s Central Park doing Shakespeare’s romantic comedy under a Stacey Abrams 2020 banner—starring Danielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman, directed by Kenny Leon. This American resetting radically changes the Shakespearean precursor to the modern rom coms in which two people who can’t stand each other end up falling in love. We studied this performance as first-year college students, this March, around the time our campus closed due to coronavirus.”
Word Frequency Analysis Of The Senate Hearing With Tech Titans
Professor Galloway - 7/31/20
“Go Memorize A Poem”
Atlantic - 7/29/20

“Perhaps, then, it is not a bad time to turn to poetry—and particularly to give those children who will have to go to school online in the fall and are driving their parents to the edge some valuable educational successes. Get them to memorize some poems and declaim them, then talk about what they mean.”
A Fourth Category Of Literature: Literature of Power
New York Review of Books - 7/28/20
“Large DNA Study Traces Violent History of American Slavery”
New York Times - 7/23/20
“Looking At Epic Poetry Through 21st-Century Eyes”
New York Times - 7/23/20
“Teaching U.S. History Through A Trauma Lens”
Middle Web - 7/22/20

“In our first conversation, “Teaching U.S. History in Turbulent Times,” we left off by discussing which primary sources are most effective for conveying empathy and gravitas in history lessons. This leads into another topic that has gripped me lately: how to sufficiently teach about systemic racism and oppression without making this lens the only way students see history.”
Theophrastus, Early Lit Crit, And Character Types
The Paris Review - 7/22/20
What Makes A Rodin A Rodin?
Stanford - 7/20/20
Wordsworth at 250
Harper’s - 7/1/20
“Are History Textbooks Worth Using Anymore?”
EdSurge - 6/30/20
“Survey of Mostly-White Educators Finds 1 in 5 Think Textbooks Accurately Reflect People Of Color”
EdWeek - 6/29/20
“Laser Mapping Reveals Largest And Oldest Mayan Temple”
CNN - 6/4/20
“8 Ways To Make Vocabulary Instruction More Effective”
SmartBrief - 5/27/20
Pandemic: When Samuel Beckett Makes Sense
LA Times - 5/25/20
“Using Children’s Books To Teach Literary Theory In High School”
Edutopia - 5/19/20
“The Real Lord Of The Flies… Six Boys Were Shipwrecked For 15 Months”
Guardian - 5/9/20

“When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller.”
An Introduction To: The Kaaba
Quartz - 5/8/20
Against Quantitative Analyses Of Literature (Via Shakespeare)
Times Literary Supplement - 4/17/20
Two COVID-19 Pop-Up Case Studies: Global Recession Recovery & Pandemic Planning
Council on Foreign Relations - 4/9/20

“Pop-up cases are short, one-page scenarios based on issues reverberating in the news today. Use one of the cases below to spark discussion and put your students in the shoes of policymakers.”
“How Pandemics Seep Into Literature”
The Paris Review - 4/8/20
1918: Cities With Longer Interventions Had Fewer Deaths And Better Economic Growth
New York Times - 4/3/20

“Their earlier work showed that cities that adopted interventions early, held them in place longer and layered them together — for instance, closing schools, banning public gatherings and isolating sick residents — were more successful managing the epidemic and reducing fatalities. The new research by Mr. Verner and colleagues adds economic data to that record.”
“How Epidemics Of The Past Changes The Way Americans Lived”
Smithsonian - 4/1/20
Will This Moment Reorient Perceptions Of Governmental Forms?
New Statesman - 4/1/20

“How much of their freedom people will want back when the pandemic has peaked is an open question. They show little taste for the enforced solidarity of socialism, but they may happily accept a regime of bio-surveillance for the sake of better protection of their health. Digging ourselves out of the pit will demand more state intervention not less, and of a highly inventive kind.”
Jill Lepore: “What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About
New Yorker - 3/23/20
Why People Read Apocalyptic Fiction In Times Like These
The Conversation - 3/19/20
COVID-19: “Pandemics From Homer To Stephen King: What We Can Learn From Literary History”
The Conversation - 3/17/20
Election Security: A Pop-Up Case Study For Schools
Council on Foreign Relations - 2/27/20
On Using A Linguistic Analysis To Assess Edgar Allen Poe’s Mental State
Lancaster University - 2/24/20
Resources On News Literacy And Spotting Fake News
New York Times - 2/20/20
Jane Eyre In Translation. Every Translation.
Poets and Writers - 2/12/20
The New Yorker Profiles Yuval Noah Harari
New Yorker - 2/10/20
Write Letters To Politicians For A Class Project: 6 Tips For Success
Middle Web - 2/10/20
The Canterbury Tales Is Released As An App
Phys - 2/3/20
Teaching The Coronavirus: Council On Foreign Relations Makes 2-Page Case Study
Council on Foreign Relations - 2/1/20
24 Books By Black Authors Coming Out This Winter
Essence - 1/22/20
How Students Are Participating In The Iowa Caucuses
EdWeek - 1/21/20
Does Pop Culture Evolve At The Same Rate As Birds And Bugs?
Wired - 1/20/20

“For both groups, Leroi’s team calculated a value reflecting the rate of evolutionary change. Their analysis showed the rate over time was similar for both groups. He goes so far as to suggest cultural artifacts can be viewed as organisms: They grow, change, and reproduce.”
Primary Source Examples Of Partisanship At Work In Textbooks
New York Times - 1/12/20
A Collection Of Essays: The Humanities Apocalypse Isn’t Coming. It’s Here.
Chronicle of Higher Education - 1/11/20

“The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it. Preliminary data suggest that hiring is at an all-time low. Entire subfields (modernism, Victorian poetry) have essentially ceased to exist. In some years, top-tier departments are failing to place a single student in a tenure-track job. Aspirants to the field have almost no professorial prospects; practitioners, especially those who advise graduate students, must face the uneasy possibility that their professional function has evaporated… Altogether, these essays and articles offer a comprehensive picture of an unfolding catastrophe.”
Can A Computer Write Poetry? The Question Is Getting Less Hypothetical
New Yorker - 1/7/20
The Zora Canon: 100 Best Books By African American Women
Medium - 1/7/20
“The Cultural Canon Is Better Than Ever”
New York Times - 12/27/19
A Discussion Of The NYT 1619 Project, About Slavery In America
Atlantic - 12/23/19
The Shortcomings Of “Centrist Bias”
New York Times - 12/22/19

“The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor rights, the New Deal, civil rights for black Americans, Reagan’s laissez-faire revolution and same-sex marriage all started outside the boundaries of what either party favored. “The most consequential history,” Harris wrote, “is usually not driven by the center.””
“Against Economics”
New York Review of Books - 12/5/19
In Search Of A Universal Grammar In Music. Found?
Behavioral Scientist - 12/3/19

“But the team didn’t just look at the relationship between songs and the behaviors that go with them. They also built a discography with actual song recordings, in order to understand if the music itself shared common features. The discography consists of one example of four types of songs—love, healing, lullaby, and dance—from 30 regions around the world.”
Who Actually Transcribed The Epic Of Gilgamesh?
Literary Hub - 11/21/19
On The Collapse Of The Information Ecosystem
Guardian - 11/19/19

“We see it play out every day with the viral spread of misinformation, widening news deserts and the proliferation of fake news. This collapse has much in common with the environmental collapse of the planet that we’re only now beginning to grasp, and its consequences for life as we know it are shaping up to be just as profound.”
High School Students Are Unprepared To Judge Internet Source Credibility
Stanford - 11/18/19

“More than 96 percent of high school students surveyed failed to consider that ties to the fossil fuel industry might affect the credibility of a website about climate change, while more than half believed a grainy video on Facebook that claimed to show ballot stuffing (which was actually shot in Russia) constituted “strong evidence” of voter fraud in the United States.”
Zadie Smith On Growing Up In The Algorithm
The Star - 11/8/19

“If you are under 30, and you are able to think for yourself right now, God bless you.”
How Memphis Rebuilt Parks Named After The Confederacy
Fast Company - 11/5/19
What Happened To Shakespeare’s Library?
Guardian - 10/24/19
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between The World And Me” Goes On Tour As A Play
American Theatre - 10/22/19
Can We Actually Learn From History, Or Are We Doomed To Repeat It?
New York Times - 10/16/19

“Time and again, rational calculations prove as faulty as irrational forces prove overwhelming. Pericles, the Athenian leader praised for his ability to plan for all eventualities, dies in the unanticipated plague that strikes the city.”
Lost Chapter From ‘Tale Of The Genji’ Found In Japan
Guardian - 10/12/19
Writing China's Soong Dynasty, And How That Challenges Written History
Irish Times - 10/12/19
How To Talk About Impeachment In Your Classes, Including Resources
History Tech - 10/3/19
A New Book About Prose Poems
The Walrus - 9/19/19
Miltonists Rejoice: Milton’s Annotated Shakespeare Has Been Found
Guardian - 9/16/19

“Shakespeare is our most famous writer, and the poet John Milton was his most famous younger contemporary. It was, until a few days ago, simply too much to hope that Milton’s own copy of Shakespeare might have survived — and yet the evidence here so far is persuasive. This may be one of the most important literary discoveries of modern times.”
On The Intersection Of Shakespeare And Hip-Hop
Hechinger Report - 9/3/19
Carmen Sandiego Is Back.
EdSurge - 8/27/19
Science Fiction As Tool For Teaching Ethics In A Digital World
Wired - 8/26/19
“How Do We Teach With Primary Sources When So Many Voices Are Missing?”
EdWeek - 8/16/19

“Gathering in small groups around folding tables laden with 250-year-old maps, pamphlets, and images, the teachers thought aloud about what the documents could tell their students—and what questions the pages couldn’t answer.”
Umberto Eco: On How We Interpret Signs And Symbols
Times Literary Supplement - 8/14/19
Quartz On Toni Morrison
Quartz - 8/6/19
The New York Times On Toni Morrison
New York Times - 8/6/19
How The NYT Wrote About Herman Melville Over The Years
New York Times - 8/1/19
Your Students Can Help The Library Of Congress Transcribe Suffragist Papers
Smithsonian - 7/30/19
Jill Lepore On Herman Melville’s Writing Habits
New Yorker - 7/22/19
“Does Gatsby Still Matter?”
NAIS - 7/16/19
“The Humanities Are ‘Useless.’ (Unless You Want A Job. Or To Change The World.)
History Tech - 7/10/19
A History Of The Novel 1984, And Commentary
Atlantic - 7/1/19
“A Meditation On Exclamation Marks In… Poetry”
The Millions - 6/27/19
On The Value Of Telling The Life Stories Of Historical Figures
Middle Web - 6/25/19
“Joy Harjo Becomes The First Native American U.S. Poet Laureate”
NPR - 6/19/19
“Doing History” Is Hard And Requires Specific Skills (cf. Journalism)
Washington Post - 6/11/19
Was Shakespeare A Woman? Scholars Respond.
Atlantic - 6/8/19

“The piece sparked great interest in Bassano’s life and curiosity about women’s literary contributions in Shakespeare’s era, the challenges facing Shakespeare biographers, and feminist themes in the work. It also generated dissent, most notably the argument that the piece did not pay sufficient attention to the scholarly consensus that any case for anyone other than Shakespeare is conjectural.”
Noah Webster, The Dictionary, And The Nationalism Of Language
Atlantic - 5/28/19
Booker Prize Goes To An Arabic Novel For The First Time
New York Times - 5/21/19
“Was Shakespeare A Woman?” - A Remarkable, Provocative Essay
Atlantic - 5/16/19
Arundhati Roy’s PEN Lecture: On Writing In A Hardening World
Guardian - 5/13/19
Is Making College Free The Key To Saving The Humanities?
Pacific Standard - 5/9/19
How We Began To Develop A Modern Conception Of History And Time
Aeon - 5/7/19
Information On “State Sponsored Disinformation In The Digital Age”
US State Department - 5/1/19
Trivial Pursuit: Shakespeare Edition
Open Culture - 4/26/19
On Thinking Like A Fact Checker, And Where “Digital Literacy” Fails
Chronicle of Higher Education - 4/25/19
More On Robert Caro, LBJ, And Writing
Guardian - 4/21/19
“The Tale Of The Genji” Comes To New York
New Yorker - 4/19/19
Digital Humanities Analysis Of Beowulf Support Single Authorship
Guardian - 4/8/19
Is The US A Democracy Or A Republic? Michigan Debated For 5 Years.
New York Times - 4/7/19

"The debate was really about bigger disagreements that transcended party lines: about how to deal with populism and protest, and about whether the United States is a unified entity of citizens or a conglomeration of groups divided by race, class, language and other identities.”
Should We Create A Field To Study How And Why Disagreement Happens?
Atlantic - 4/7/19
Enter The NYT Student Blackout Poetry Contest, By May 9
New York Times - 4/4/19
Reflections On The Limits Of Computational Analyses Of Literature
UChicago - 4/1/19
English Prof Explores Machine Learning As Intersection With Humanities
Chronicle of Higher Education - 3/27/19

“It is important for humanists to know how machine learning works, not because we all need to use it, but because it will help us understand why the boundary between quantitative and qualitative reasoning is growing fuzzier. In the past, it was broadly right to assume that numbers couldn’t address the interpretive questions at the center of humanistic disciplines. Math might help scholars reason about literacy rates and book prices, for instance, but it couldn’t reveal much about literary judgment. The rules of that game have genuinely changed. We can see this as a threat, or as a new opening for adventurous questions about the past.”
What Shakespeare Left Out
The Mary Sue - 3/22/19

“Though his oeuvre explores the depths and heights of human existence, here are a few of the major elements curiously absent from the canon of one of the world’s greatest writers… Successful rebellion… Independent women (who stay that way)… Moms… Healthy relationships…”
Chaucer, The European Poet
Aeon - 3/22/19
On Charlotte Perkins Gilman And ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
Literary Hub - 3/21/19
“Teaching the “Odyssey” With The New York Times”
New York Times - 3/21/19

“Below, five lesson ideas that draw on Times resources to help students navigate the wine-dark seas and discover how the “Odyssey” might speak to their own lives and the world around them.”
[FIXED LINK] Museums Reconsider Dioramas And Other Exhibits About Colonial Times
New York Times - 3/20/19
New Biography Of Frederick Douglass
Times Literary Supplement - 3/19/19
“A Framework For Teaching American Slavery - From Teaching Tolerance”
History Tech - 3/16/19
Some Multimedia Resources For History Classes
History Tech - 3/7/19

"We tell [kids] about history and have them read about history but we never let them experience history. They never get to actually “see” the individual people and events and details – students rely on us to describe those things for them.”
History State Standards: An Analysis Of Gender And Racial Representation
Smithsonian - 3/1/19
"A New Center For Fiction Is Opening In Brooklyn”
Literary Hub - 2/15/19
The Map Of American Empire, As You Likely Haven’t Seen It
Guardian - 2/15/19
The Dark Lady: A Fascinating Theory About Shakespeare’s Last Sonnets
WBUR - 2/8/19
History Is In Decline In Colleges Everywhere… Except the Ivies.
New Yorker - 2/4/19

“For the past decade, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college… There’s a catch, however. It’s boom time for history at Yale, where it is the third most popular major, and at other élite schools, including Brown, Princeton, and Columbia, where it continues to be among the top declared majors.”
The New Generation Of Poets Is Made Of Women On Instagram
Guardian - 1/26/19

“Young women aged 13 to 24 are now the biggest consumers of poetry in the UK in a market that has grown by 48% over the past five years to £12.3m, according to UK book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan. But instead of buying works by the dead white men who have dominated the canon for centuries, young women are using their economic muscle to drive up sales of works by female poets, making poetry more diverse and representative than ever before.”
US Library Of Congress Digitizes Only Arabic Slave Narrative From US
Smithsonian - 1/18/19
High School Students Draft Bill To Release FBI Files. It Becomes Law.
Clarion Ledger - 1/9/19

"Wexler said when he told his students in 2015 about how many civil rights cold cases had gone unsolved and how many of those files remained redacted, they were upset. The bill the students wrote creates an independent review board of experts to analyze and release government files on civil rights cold cases… Their teacher, Stuart Wexler, said as far as he can tell from extensive research, this is the first high school class ever to draft a federal bill that became law.”
How Elementary And Middle School Teachers Use Harry Potter In Class
NPR - 12/31/18
“J.D. Salinger At 100: Is The Catcher In The Rye Still Relevant?”
Washington Post - 12/30/18
On The Centenary Of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Poems”
Poetry Foundation - 12/26/18

"The strangeness of Hopkins’s formal innovations, slipping off the bonds of iambic convention, and of his fragile and febrile sensibility, came not piecemeal but all at once, fully developed, in the posthumous 1918 edition of the poems.”
On Bringing Music Further Into The Study Of History (More Than Just Hamilton)
History Tech - 12/4/18
A Visualization Of The Nations That Have Preoccupied The US Since 1900
Pudding - 12/1/18
Connect Past And Present: Questions, Themes, Events, Artifacts, People And More
New York Times - 11/29/18

“We suggest different methods teachers can use to easily facilitate these connections. Each method is illustrated with two examples, one from global history and another from United States history, and each ends with a classroom challenge. The goal is to help this kind of thinking become a habit of mind for your students.”
The History Major Is Seeing Historic Declines In Numbers
Inside Higher Ed - 11/27/18
Reading Fiction Improves Social Ability/Empathy (A Little)
Psychology Today - 11/19/18
18th Century Social Networks, Seen In Ben Franklin’s Letters.
Stanford - 11/12/18
Reconsidering The Internet’s Role In Political Polarization
Boston Review - 11/12/18

“So, if the most polarized population uses the Internet and social media the least, to suddenly point a finger at technology says more about our anxieties about the rate of technological change than about what has actually happened to us. The fact is that this twenty-two-year-old dynamic of polarization can’t easily be associated with the Internet.”
“Indonesian Caves Hold Oldest Figurative Painting Ever Found…”
NPR - 11/7/18
"Is Democracy At Risk?” - A New York Times Lesson Plan
New York Times - 11/7/18

"Often we take for granted that the United States is a democracy, and that democracy is a form of government worth celebrating. This lesson starts there, but then pushes students to reflect on why democracies are worth protecting, what elements are essential to a healthy democracy and how it is that democracies sometimes fail.”
On The “Self-Evident” Line Of The Declaration Of Independence [Video]
Atlantic - 11/2/18
Scholars Choose Most Influential Academic Books From Last 20 Years
Chronicle of Higher Education - 10/30/18
“Frankenstein at 200”
New York Times - 10/25/18
Kids These Days… Are Actually Better At Spotting News vs. Opinion?
Pew Research - 10/23/18
Understanding The Generational Divide In Spotting News vs. Opinion
Atlantic - 10/23/18
A Deep Dive In The Role Of Civics In History Classes And School
EdWeek - 10/23/18
A Moment In Praise Of Jill Lepore, And The Power Of Stories
New York Review of Books - 10/19/18

“For Lepore, history is essentially a writing problem: how we know what we know (or think we do), how different forms and genres transmit different kinds of signals, what it might mean to encounter a gap between the evidence and the truth. Her work has confronted the tension between what a reader needs to know for a story to work and the limits of what can be known, and what makes the difference between a person and a character.”
“Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?”
Nautilus - 10/18/18

"These examples illustrate Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?”
Revisiting Frederick Douglass: A Compelling Celebration Of His Life
New Yorker - 10/15/18

“In his legacy as prophetic radical and political pragmatist, in the almost unimaginable bravery of his early journey and the resilience of his later career, in his achievements as a writer, activist, crusader, intellectual, father, and man, the claim that he was the greatest figure that America has ever produced seems hard to challenge.”
Printed Books, 600 Years Before Gutenberg, In Dunhuang, China
London Review Of Books - 10/12/18
A Case For “Civilization” To Replace “Oregon Trail” As Game In Schools
Medium - 10/10/18
A Visualization Of Today’s Increased Political Polarization
Futurity - 10/1/18
On Understanding The History Of Philosophy In Africa
Quartz - 9/30/18
On The Healing Power Of Poetry: How Doctors Use Verse
Nautilus - 9/27/18

“One randomized clinical trial by researchers at the University of Maranhão studied the effect of passive listening to music or poetry on the pain, depression, and hope scores of 65 adult patients hospitalized in a cancer facility. They found that both types of art therapy produced similar improvements in pain intensity and depression scores. Only poetry, however, increased hope scores.”
More On Digital Humanities, In High School And In University
EdSurge - 9/20/18

"One of the things that we’re going for… is helping [students] understand that they can mix disciplines—that they can think computationally about texts, that they can apply computer science skills and thinking to other areas of life.”
Should We Question Zinn’s People’s History Of The US?
Slate - 9/16/18
Teach Students To Argue Well By Using Controversy Mapping
ASCD - 9/13/18
Reflections On Two Cycles Of A High School Digital Humanities Course
Medium - 9/6/18

“And yet, in all these examples, after identifying passages via distant reading techniques, close reading those passages is where the nuanced meaning-making happens. This is a model one increasingly hears to describe the digital humanities: it’s the telescope that helps find where to point the microscope.”
John Quincy Adams Wrote An Epic Poem
Lapham’s Quarterly - 9/6/18
Looking Back On “The Outsiders”
New York Times - 9/5/18
Value The Canon, Sure, But Recognize The Strength Of New, Diverse Poets
Atlantic - 9/1/18

"More than a few of this generation’s bright lights found poetry first through performance, or come from communities where “spoken word” and “poetry” are not separate lanes. Other poets have shown a talent for building an audience in less embodied ways.”
J. R. R. Tolkein’s Final Final Novel: "The Fall Of Gondolin”
Smithsonian - 8/29/18
In Defense Of The Romance Novel (And A History Of The Word “Romantic”)
LA Review of Books - 8/27/18
A Close Look At The Drop In Humanities Majors
Atlantic - 8/23/18
10 Writers On Books They’d Like To See In The High School Curriculum
New York Times - 8/21/18
On How Students Struggle With Interpreting Literature
Smart Set - 8/16/18

“I want them to do all the things: read against the grain, interrogate their own assumptions, and the biggie: think critically about what they read. In the end, however, Eliot’s “sea-girls” must speak for themselves even if it means they’re whispering one thing into the ears of my male students while beckoning the women to follow them out of the fog and into the “chambers of the sea.””
A List Of Latin American Texts — And The Canonical Texts They Can Replace
Remezcla - 8/9/18

“Below is a list of nine books that you can read in addition to (or, we don’t want to tell you not to do you your homework, buuuut…) the canonical texts on your curriculum. And remember, the best part of making your own curriculum is debating and amending it, so have at it in the comments.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins: 100 Years Since Being Published
New Statesman - 8/8/18
“Wikipedia, The Last Bastion Of Shared Reality”
Atlantic - 8/7/18

“As the rest of the media has lost its power as something like a neutral arbiter of reality, Wikipedia’s grip on that center has tightened. In the current conspiracy-obsessed world, where real structural divisions, technological change, and racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts have created deep polarization, Wikipedia’s importance is recognized by (basically) all.”
"Where Do Confederate Monuments Go After They Come Down?”
NPR - 8/5/18
Extraordinary Visualization Of How America Uses Its Land
Bloomberg - 7/31/18

“The data can’t be pinpointed to a city block—each square on the map represents 250,000 acres of land. But piecing the data together state-by-state can give a general sense of how U.S. land is used.”
Maybe US Culture Isn’t Urban v. Rural, But Shaped By Colonial History
New York Times - 7/30/18
Compose An Op-Ed: For Middle School, Or Any Grade, Really
Middle Web - 7/29/18
A Deep Look At Numbers Of Humanities Majors Over Time
Sapping Attention - 7/27/18
“An English Teacher Wonders: What Is Literature, Anyway?”
Literary Hub - 7/26/18
Can The Humanities And Economics Be Reconciled?
New Yorker - 7/23/18

“I want to believe Morson and Schapiro and Desai when they posit that the gap between economics and the humanities can be bridged, but my experience in both writing fiction and studying economics leads me to think that they’re wrong. The hedgehog doesn’t want to learn from the fox. The realist novel is a solemn enemy of equations. The project of reducing behavior to laws and the project of attending to human beings in all their complexity and specifics are diametrically opposed.”
Graphic Novel Is Booker Nominee For First Time
New York Times - 7/23/18
A Retelling Of Beowulf, From Grendel’s Mother, As A Strong Suburban Mom
NPR - 7/22/18
“Disrupt Texts” — Twitter Conversations Challenging Canonical Texts
Chicago Tribune - 7/18/18
Obama’s Reading List Before Visiting Africa
Facebook - 7/13/18

“Over the years since, I've often drawn inspiration from Africa's extraordinary literary tradition. As I prepare for this trip, I wanted to share a list of books that I’d recommend for summer reading, including some from a number of Africa’s best writers and thinkers – each of whom illuminate our world in powerful and unique ways.”
Oldest Extract Of The Odyssey Found In Southern Greece
Guardian - 7/10/18
The English Patient Wins Public Poll Of Best Booker Prize In 50 Years
Guardian - 7/8/18
"2017 Notable Poetry Books For Children”
NCTE - 7/1/18
Some Writers On Insomnia
Literary Hub - 6/26/18
“Donald Hall, a Poet Laureate of the Rural Life, Is Dead at 89”
New York Times - 6/24/18
Narrative Texts Go Fully Digital: Into Social Media
New Yorker - 6/18/18

“Almost since the start of the smartphone era, film and TV producers have been trying to figure out how to capitalize on our new habit of jumping from one screen to the next. At first, many of these efforts felt like tricks. With “skam,” the multi-platform approach feels organic—after all, the characters themselves are constantly shuttling among YouTube and Instagram and Facebook Messenger.”
"Improving The Way We Teach About Slavery”
Cult of Pedagogy - 6/17/18
Frankenstein: Tributes To The Science, Ethics & Creativity Of The Novel
Brain Pickings - 6/14/18
Shakespeare, On Science
New Atlantis - 6/5/18

“Shakespeare suggests that one of the poet’s most important tasks in an age dominated by science is to survey the full extent of science’s power to shape our minds and souls, and then to turn to the poetic imagination in response.”
“Assassin’s Creed” (Video Game) Releases Classroom Version
History Tech - 5/31/18

“Following last year’s release of Assassin’s Creed Origins, set in Ptolemaic Egypt, the team behind it decided that allowing players to learn more about life in ancient Egypt might make for a pretty cool teaching aid. So they traded in the quests and violence for antiquities and history lessons, and created a mode with a series of Discovery Tours.”
A Great Reflection On “Canon” In Today’s Political Moment
New York Times - 5/30/18
“The Book Of Songs: Poems That Helped Shape Chinese Thought”
BBC - 5/30/18
Interactive Map Of Odysseus’ Travels In The Mediterranean
Story Maps - 5/14/18
Further Explorations Into High School Digital Humanities
Mark Connolly - 5/12/18
The First Review Of Each Of Toni Morrison’s Novels
Literary Hub - 5/7/18
"Are Museums the Right Home for Confederate Monuments?”
Smithsonian - 5/7/18
“The Historian Behind Slavery Apologists Like Kanye West”
New York Times - 5/3/18
An Unpublished Book By Zora Neale Hurston Is Found
Vulture - 4/29/18
Margaret Atwood On How She Wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale”
LitHub - 4/25/18
When Mathematics And Poetry Intersect
Smithsonian - 4/24/18
Google Opens Access To 3D Archive Of World Heritage Sites
Google - 4/16/18
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remains Found In A Wine Cellar
Guardian - 4/12/18
"Your Pocket Guide To 10 Literary Movements”
Literary Hub - 4/5/18
A Short History Of Young People’s Roles In Elections
New York Times - 3/26/18
“Women’s-Studies Students… Are Editing Wikipedia”
Chronicle of Higher Education - 3/20/18
A Classics Scholar Makes The Old New, Shares It On Twitter
New Yorker - 3/19/18
“The Humanities Are Dead. Long Live The Humanities.”
Pacific Standard - 3/13/18
50 Students Suggest Connections Between Classic Texts And Today
New York Times - 2/22/18
Erasmus, Luther, And The Populist Uprising
New York Review of Books - 2/20/18
Tinder Profiles For Literature’s “Complicated Men” [Humor]
McSweeney’s - 2/13/18

"Name: Jay Gatsby. Age: How old do you want me to be lol”
Huck Finn, Mockingbird: Classics May Not Be Best Any More
Star Tribune - 2/12/18
Can We Read Video Games As Texts?
Edutopia - 2/9/18
"Shocker: Humanities Grads Gainfully Employed and Happy”
Inside Higher Ed - 2/7/18
Plagiarism Software Identifies More Of Shakespeare’s Sources
New York Times - 2/7/18

"In reviewing the book before it was published, David Bevington, professor emeritus in the humanities at the University of Chicago and editor of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (7th Edition),” called it “a revelation” for the sheer number of correlations with the plays, eclipsed only by the chronicles of Holinshed and Hall and Plutarch’s “Lives.””
Laser Scans Reveal Mayan Empire Might Have Been Millions Larger
Washington Post - 2/3/18
“The Things They Made Me Carry”: On Diversifying A Curriculum
Teaching While White - 2/1/18

"I taught some chapters of The Things They Carried alongside The Gangster We Are All Looking For. As I was finally able to teach about the Vietnam War through a Vietnamese family’s eyes, I found my true voice again. And once I found my voice, my students found me.”
Is Storytelling An Essential Component Of Human Culture?
Pacific Standard - 1/26/18
NYT Video Essay: “Is There Something Wrong With Democracy?”
New York Times - 1/24/18

"After 200 years of expansion, democracy’s growth in the world has stalled. A handful of democracies like Venezuela and Hungary are backsliding into authoritarianism. And even in established Western democracies, voters are losing faith in democratic institutions and norms… Is this all just a blip, or is democracy in real trouble?”
"Orality and Literacy from Homer to Twitter”
Kottke - 1/5/18

"There are marked differences in the ways that oral and literate cultures think about memory, originality, and repetition. In highly literate cultures, there is a tendency to dismiss repetitive or formulaic discourse as cliche; we think of it as boring or lazy writing. In primarily oral cultures, repetition tends to be much more highly valued. Repeated phrases, stories, or tropes can be preserved to some extent over many generations without the use of writing, allowing people in an oral culture to remember their own past.”
"The 10 Best Social Studies Sites Of All Time”
History Tech - 12/31/17
Considering Joseph Conrad’s Place Today
Irish Times - 12/16/17
A Collection Of Articles About Humanities Research In The Digital Age
Stanford - 12/14/17
Teaching Suggestions For Making Connections Betw. World And Studies
New York Times - 12/7/17

“You can use the activities below whether or not your students are participating in the challenge. On their own, they can be an interesting way to end a unit or a semester. But you can also do them, individually or in sequence, to help students generate ideas for the challenge.”
Nate Silver Makes “The Gerrymandering Project” And Does The Math
FiveThirtyEight - 11/30/17

"Redistricting has a huge effect on U.S. politics but is greatly misunderstood. This project uncovers what’s really broken, what's not and whether gerrymandering can (or should) be killed.”
“Today’s Biggest Threat… Isn’t Fake News — It’s Selective Facts”
Quartz - 11/16/17
“Paltering” A New Word For Selective Truth Telling
BBC - 11/15/17
3500 Year Old Grecian Seal Stone Found: Scene From Iliad?
New York Times - 11/6/17
Most Scientists Now Reject That First Americans Came By Land
Ars Technica - 11/4/17
Joseph Conrad And Cyclical Globalism
Literary Review - 11/1/17
Distant Reading: Digital Humanities Works To Find Its Place
New York Times - 10/30/17
Guardian Asks For “Decolonized Canon” And Readers Make A List
Guardian - 10/26/17
"You’ve Probably Never Heard of America’s Most Popular Playwright”
New Yorker - 10/16/17
Defining “Culture”: 37% Of Visitors Think Museums Aren’t “Culture”
Artsy - 10/16/17
Dave Eggers Interviews And Profiles Chimamanda Adichie
New York Times - 10/16/17
“‘Allah’ Is Found On Viking Funeral Clothes”
New York Times - 10/14/17
Read An Excerpt Of Phillip Pullman’s New Book “The Book Of Dust”
NPR - 10/13/17
Toni Morrison Releases New Book: “The Origin Of Others”
Pacific Standard - 10/11/17
Sylvia Plath’s Letters Have Been Collected And Published
New York Times - 10/10/17
Dartmouth Library’s Reference Guide On Evaluating Sources
Dartmouth - 10/5/17

"This guide will help you critically evaluate an article, book, chapter, web page, or other publication and determine its suitability for your purposes.”
Revisiting Ulysses S. Grant. Worthy of More Praise Than He Gets?
New Yorker - 10/2/17
Ta-Nehisi Coates Returns With “We Were Eight Years In Power”
LA Times - 9/29/17
1855 Handwritten Essay By A Slave, Found In The NYPL
New York Times - 9/25/17
Were We Better Off Without Civilization?
New Yorker - 9/18/17
Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” Goes To Broadcast
New York Times - 9/14/17
“America’s Changing Religious Identity”
PRRI - 9/6/17

“The single largest survey of American religious and denominational identity ever conducted. This landmark report is based on a sample of more than 101,000 Americans from all 50 states and includes detailed information about their religious affiliation, denominational ties, political affiliation, and other important demographic attributes.”
Some History And An Improbably Return Of The City-State
Aeon - 9/5/17
“Mr. America” - A Profile Of Ken Burns
New Yorker - 9/4/17
Emoji Poetry Contest: Read the Emojis, Guess the Poem
Paris Review - 8/31/17
Mary Shelley Wrote A Plague Dystopia Set In 2100!
Smithsonian - 8/30/17
Kerfuffle About Leaving The “E” Off The End Of “Shakespear"…
NPR - 8/24/17
What Freedom of Speech Does and Doesn’t Include
United States Courts (.gov) - 8/19/17

"Freedom of speech includes the right: To use certain offensive words and phrases to convey political messages… Freedom of speech does not include the right: To incite actions that would harm others.”
Digital Humanities Analysis Reveals How the Alt-Right Coalesced
Quartz - 8/18/17

"They’re a loose collection of people from disparate backgrounds who would never normally interact: bored teenagers, gamers, men’s rights activists, conspiracy theorists and, yes, white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But thanks to the internet, they’re beginning to form a cohesive group identity. And I have the data to prove it… I used Google’s BigQuery tool, which lets you trawl through massive datasets in seconds, to interrogate a collection of every Reddit comment ever made—all 3 billion of them.”
How Do We Teach WWI From A Non-Western Perspective?
Stanford - 8/18/17
UVM Has A “Computational Story Lab”: Math + CS + Lit
Outside - 8/11/17
Founder of Smithsonian Never Set Foot In America [See End of Post]
New York Times - 8/10/17
Stanford Publishes Thousands Of (Inspiring!) Medieval Texts
Global Medieval Sourcebook - 8/4/17
Statistics And Literature: The Pre-Adolescence Of Digital Humanities
New Yorker - 7/27/17
"The Most Anthologized Poems Of The Last 25 Years”
Literary Hub - 7/24/17
Kids Don't Need Dumbing Down. Bring Them To See Shakespeare
New York Times - 7/24/17
The Life And Death Of John Keats
New York Review of Books - 7/24/17
Looking Back At Tom Stoppard’s Oeuvre
Prospect Magazine - 7/20/17
Paradise Lost Is Being Translated Faster Than Ever Before
Guardian - 7/20/17
Jon Batiste Reimagines “Battle Hymn Of The Republic”
Atlantic - 7/19/17
Photographers Take Pictures Inspired By Contemporary Poems
New York Times - 7/14/17
Rethinking Globalization
Guardian - 7/14/17
Robert Frost’s Letters On Teaching, Writing, And Having Fun
Times Literary Supplement - 7/7/17
"The Word Choices That Explain Why Jane Austen Endures”
New York Times - 7/6/17
Most Anthologized Short Stories
Literary Hub - 7/6/17
Who Teaches Social Studies? Here’s Some Data.
Brookings - 7/3/17
3 Books About The Importance Of The Humanities In A Tech Age
Harvard Business Review - 7/1/17
Poetry Magazine: The Asian American Poetry Issue
Poetry Foundation - 7/1/17
"The Best Sites Where Students Can Transcribe Historical Texts”
Larry Ferlazzo - 6/29/17
The First Recorded Poet Is A Woman: Enheduanna Of Mesopotamia
Literary Hub - 6/22/17
Using Storytelling Principles From “The Moth” For Class
KQED - 6/19/17

"So far, 300 teachers from around the world have formed partnerships with The Moth that allow them to use the curriculum for free and to interact with one another on a just-for-teachers portal. Blei hopes the number of users grows. “We want to create a global community of student storytellers.””
On Books Based On Minor Characters
Baffler - 6/15/17
Is Postmodernism Over?
Times Literary Supplement - 6/12/17
The Poetry Foundation Has A Few Poetry Documentaries
Poetry Foundation - 6/6/17
Ginsburg’s “Howl”: The Full Manuscript Online
Stanford - 6/5/17
Reflecting on Thoreau
The Nation - 6/1/17
On Music, Politics, And The Revolutionary Innovation Of Beyonce
Eidolon - 5/22/17
“Harvard Student Submits Rap Album As [English] Senior Thesis”
Houston Chronicle - 5/20/17
In Defense Of The Humanities, When More Schools Are Cutting Them
Guardian - 5/12/17

"Those of us who teach and study are aware of what these areas of learning provide: the ability to think critically and independently; to tolerate ambiguity; to see both sides of an issue; to look beneath the surface of what we are being told; to appreciate the ways in which language can help us understand one another more clearly and profoundly – or, alternately, how language can conceal and misrepresent. They help us learn how to think, and they equip us to live in – to sustain – a democracy.”
Short, Brilliant, Interactive Gerrymandering Game
Polytrope - 5/11/17
Literary Genre Preferences Seem To Reflect Moral Perspectives
Pacific Standard - 5/9/17

"Fans of science fiction and fantasy, as well as literary fiction, lean toward a more permissive moral style. Romance and mystery readers, in contrast, tend to abide by a more rigid sense of right and wrong.”
Visualization: Have Songs Gotten More Repetitive?
Pudding - 5/1/17
A Computer Analyzes 500 “Modern Love” NYT Articles
Quartz - 4/26/17
The New Yorker Goes Deep With The Odyssey, A Family Journey
New Yorker - 4/24/17

"At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen, who were not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home.”
The Globe Theater Takes Hamlet To (Nearly) Every Country In The World
New York Times - 4/21/17
An Open Textbook For Introduction To Philosophy
Daily Nous - 4/20/17
On Beowulf’s Persistence In Pop Culture
Atlantic - 4/1/17
How Intraparty Fighting Led To McCarthy’s Downfall
Atlantic - 4/1/17
The Contemporary Thoreau: Lessons From The North Pond Hermit
Atlantic - 4/1/17
Interactive Macbeth Show “Sleep No More” Shaping VR Experiences
Fast Company - 3/23/17
Debriefing (And Close Reading) The Oxford Comma Flap
Columbia Journalism Review - 3/21/17
On The Importance Of Reading The World, Not Just Ourselves
New Republic - 3/20/17
“Why Milton Still Matters” - A Call For More “Paradise Lost”
Spectator - 3/18/17
Kevin Young Is The New Poetry Editor At The New Yorker
New York Times - 3/15/17
A Statistical Analysis Of Great And Popular Writers’ Writing
Smithsonian - 3/14/17
Jane Austen’s Unfinished Novel “Sandition”
New Yorker - 3/13/17
The CRAAP Test: The ALA’s Guide To Assessing News Credibility
Huffington Post - 3/9/17
Remembering Nussbaum’s Defense Of The Humanities
Frontline/The Hindu - 3/3/17
How Statistical Analysis Is Playing A Role In Literary Analysis
Economist - 3/1/17
401 Open-Ended Writing Prompts On 20 Contemporary Topics
New York Times - 3/1/17
American Library Association Provides Fake News Resource Round-Up
American Library Association - 2/23/17
Lost Novel By Walt Whitman Discovered By Grad Student
NPR - 2/21/17
Gov’t Separation Of Powers: Current Lessons and Links from the NYT
New York Times - 2/16/17
On Teaching “Frankenstein”: NYT Offers Lessons, Links, Primary Sources
New York Times - 2/15/17
Teaching 1984: NYT Offers Tips and Essential Questions
New York Times - 2/9/17
What 12,000 Students Think About Free Speech
New York Times - 2/7/17
Sometimes Fictional Literary Places Become Real Street Addresses
Guardian - 2/7/17
Camus & Sartre: A 3 Minute Movie On Why Their Friendship Fell Apart
Aeon - 1/31/17
3 Ways To Engage The Executive Order On Immigration In Class
Facing History And Ourselves - 1/30/17
1984 And Other Books Surge in Sales
Atlantic - 1/25/17
More Resources For Teaching The Inauguration
Larry Ferlazzo - 1/21/17
Revisiting Emily Dickinson In The Age Of The “Nasty Woman”
New York Times - 1/19/17
Jane Austen At 200
Guardian - 1/14/17
Does The Rise In Translation Mean More Generic Literature?
Literary Hub - 1/4/17
A Collection Of Resources About The 2017 Presidential Inauguration
Larry Ferlazzo - 1/1/17
Why Do We Have Poetry?
New York Times - 12/30/16
Media Literacy: Fake News Draws our Attention Back To It
NPR - 12/22/16
Media Literacy: A Curriculum And Some Historical Context
Hechinger Report - 12/21/16
Marshall McLuhan’s Renown Was A Product Of The Media Machine
LA Review of Books - 12/20/16
Teachers: “Fake News Is Why You Exist” And Tools To Help
History Tech - 12/19/16
How To Write Fake News, A Three Week Course
EdSurge - 12/19/16
How Orwell’s 1984 Became Famous
Daily Beast - 12/18/16
“Americans Name the 10 Most Significant Historic Events of Their Lifetimes”
Pew Research - 12/15/16
The Danger Of NPR Podcasts: “Factiness" Deters You From Taking Action
New Inquiry - 12/13/16
The Cure For Fake News? Skills From History Class
Smithsonian - 12/6/16
"Why All World Maps Are Wrong” [Video]
YouTube/Vox - 12/2/16
“Integrating Critical Race Theory Into The US History Curriculum”
History Tech - 12/2/16
Cheap And Easy 3D VR So Students Can Walk/Fly Through The World
History Tech - 12/1/16
Poetry Surges On Twitter in 2016
Wired - 11/22/16
The Six Most Common Emotional Narrative Arcs
Pacific Standard - 11/21/16
Teaching 1984 After The 2016 Election
Atlantic - 11/20/16
“‘Hamilton’ And ‘1776’ Gave Us America, Just When We Needed It Most”
Howlround - 11/12/16
Why Are US Elections Always So Close?
Nautilus - 11/3/16
Does History Help Us Understand The Present? How Much?
Aeon - 11/2/16
Sid Meier’s “Civilization”: The Video Game Of World History
Longreads - 10/26/16
Paul Beatty Is First American To Win The Man Booker Prize
Guardian - 10/25/16
“The Decline Of The West, And How To Stop It”
New York Times - 10/19/16
The Collinwood Fire: Professor Spends Year Creating Online History Unit
Collinwood Fire - 10/6/16
Arundhati Roy Will Publish A Second Novel In 2017
Guardian - 10/3/16
The Growing Case For More Humanities
Chronicle of Higher Education - 10/2/16
Historically Black’: Podcast About Objects From The NMAAHC
APM Reports - 9/27/16
What Are Shakespeare’s Most Popular Plays?
Priceonomics - 9/22/16
War Veterans Write To Process Their Experience
Pacific Standard - 9/19/16
“On Not Reading”
Chronicle of Higher Education - 9/11/16
An Interesting Analysis Of What Memes Say About Our Time
Atlantic - 9/6/16
A Collection Of Election Resources
History Tech - 8/26/16
Race, Populism, Politics… And The 1896 Election
Pacific Standard - 8/22/16
Explicating Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ Using Frost’s Letters
Literary Hub - 8/18/16
On Graphing Plots Of Novels
Vulture - 8/11/16
“An Encyclopedia Of Every Literary Plot, Ever”
Vulture - 8/10/16
Teju Cole’s New Collection Of Essays: “Known And Strange Things”
New York Times - 8/9/16
A (Western) History Of Plot
Vulture - 8/9/16
An Argument For The Humanities
Chronicle of Higher Education - 8/7/16
Teacher’s Guide To Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me
Penguin Random House - 7/19/16
“Why Calvin And Hobbes Is Great Literature”
Literary Hub - 7/18/16
A Hemingway Conference: For Teachers And Scholars
Hemingway Society - 7/17/16
6,000 Years Of Global Urban Population Data, Spatialized
Wired - 7/4/16
What Is Modernism?
LA Review of Books - 7/3/16
Network Theory, Medieval History, Computation, And Laws Of History
MIT Technology Review - 6/23/16
“Refugee Tales” - A Modern Retelling Of The Canterbury Tales
Guardian - 6/13/16
George Washington: Not An Intellectual, But An Avid, Practical Reader
Farnam Street - 6/13/16
Documentary About The Making Of Hamilton, This October
PBS - 6/7/16
Teacher And Students Recast Classic Stories In Video Games
KQED - 6/3/16
An Argument For The (Sexist, Racist, Colonialist, Etc.) Canon
Slate - 5/24/16
An International Glossary Of Different Words For Happiness
New Yorker - 5/12/16
On The Need To Diversify The Philosophy Curriculum
New York Times - 5/11/16
The Astor Place “Macbeth” Clashes In NYC: 22 People Died
Literary Hub - 5/10/16
On The Glorious Names Of Dickens’ Minor Characters
JStor - 5/4/16
An Obituary For Shakespeare
New York Times - 4/23/16
A Computational Analysis Of Othello
Wolfram - 4/21/16
On How To Bring Younger Generations Back To The Voting Booth
New York Times - 4/8/16
How Do Books Make You Feel? Why English Should Teach Emotion
Atlantic - 4/5/16
Library Of Congress: Teaching Historic and Geographic Thinking
Library of Congress - 4/1/16
Shakespeare's Manuscripts: Two Versions Of Sonnet 2, Close Read
New Criterion - 4/1/16
How Eastern Philosophy Can Help Students Make College Decisions
Wall Street Journal - 4/1/16
30 Ways To Celebrate National Poetry Month
poets.org - 4/1/16
On Reading Dante Today
American Scholar - 3/22/16
Billy Collins Reads His Poem “Aristotle” ( On Beginnings, Middles, Ends)
Brain Pickings - 3/22/16
Stanley Fish: The Difference Between A Mindset And An Opinion
Weekly Standard - 3/21/16
The Wildness Of Emily Dickinson
Longreads - 3/15/16
Data On The Changing Numbers Of Humanities Majors
Inside Higher Ed - 3/14/16
The Theory Behind Computational Textual Analysis
3 Quarks Daily - 3/14/16
English Teacher Has Started Class With A Poem… For 3 Years
Edutopia - 3/11/16
Literary Scholar Analyzes The Meter Of Trump’s Haiku Tweets
Talking Points Memo - 3/7/16
An Interview With Franco Moretti
LA Review of Books - 3/2/16
What Is A Digital Liberal Arts Program?
Middlebury - 2/26/16
Statistically Understanding Suspense In Literature
Stanford - 2/18/16
Your Students Can Transcribe History For The Smithsonian
Atlas Obscura - 2/10/16
On Using The Case Study Method To Teach History
Atlantic - 2/8/16
The “Bad” Quarto: The First Printing Of Hamlet
Chronicle of Higher Education - 2/7/16
Antidote To The Shrinking Attention Span: Reading Books
New York Times - 1/22/16
Physicists Analyze Literature, Find “Multifractal Cascades” … What?
EurekAlert - 1/21/16
Robert Pinsky: Video Game Designer (Really!)
New Yorker - 1/21/16
Meanwhile, Artists Reduce Literature to Punctuation.
Fast Company - 1/21/16
David Brooks On Beauty
New York Times - 1/15/16
Hamilton, The Musical, vs. Hamilton, The Biography [paywall]
New York Review of Books - 1/14/16
Is Close Reading A Recent Educational Goal? What Was Before?
The Smart Set - 1/13/16
The Difference Between British And American Storytelling
Atlantic - 1/6/16
Obama Reviews Eliot’s Waste Land For His College Girlfriend
New York Review of Books - 1/4/16
Are All Stories The Same Story? On Storytelling And Invention
Atlantic - 1/1/16
How Stories Work, via Scam Artists
New Yorker - 12/29/15
Ta-Nehisi Coates On Hope: It Shouldn’t Be A Part of Writing History
Atlantic - 12/10/15
Smithsonian Quietly Makes Tons Of Primary Sources Available Online
LinkedIn - 11/25/15
On Teaching “Hamilton, The Musical”
History Tech - 11/19/15
A History Of Two Political Parties: 1854 - present
3 Quarks Daily - 11/16/15
The Oxford Of Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland
New York Times - 11/15/15
The Fourth Annual Harry Potter Academic Conference Happened
Pacific Standard - 11/9/15
Hundreds of Unopened 17th Century Letters Found In Netherlands
Guardian - 11/8/15
Revisiting The Salem Witch Trials
Atlantic - 11/1/15
Halloween From Hecate To Hermione: A Literary History Of Witches
Literary Hub - 10/30/15
How Self-Driving Cars Are Pushing Ethical Dilemmas
MIT Technology Review - 10/22/15
Digital Public Library of America Releases “Primary Source Sets”
Digital Public Library of America - 10/20/15
Covering Shakespeare: Jeannette Winterson Rewrites The Winter’s Tale
The Millions - 10/20/15
Are History And Historical Fiction One And The Same?
Guardian - 10/15/15
On Teaching Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Guardian - 10/12/15
This Interactive Timeline Of Human History Is Beautiful
Histography.io - 10/11/15
Should We Be Angry About People Rewriting Shakespeare?
New Yorker - 10/6/15
Is Our Mixed Monarchy Constitution Less Stable Than We Think?
Atlantic - 10/1/15
A Case for Twitter Poetry (via German Nihilism)
LA Review of Books - 9/28/15
Disaster Is Not Necessary: Jane Austen And The Happy Drama
Telegraph - 9/25/15
A New Clay Tablet Is Found, And Gilgamesh Gets A Little Longer
Ancient History, Etc - 9/24/15
Stanford’s Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Free, Online, Accurate
Quartz - 9/21/15
Reflecting On The Role Of Emerson In American Poetry
New Yorker - 9/7/15
Tolkein, Lewis, And The Inklings: A Literary Circle For The Ages
Atlantic - 9/1/15
How A Volcanic Eruption In 1815 Changed Art Everywhere
New York Times - 8/24/15
"The Meursault Investigation”: Contemporary Response to “L’Etranger"
NPR - 8/21/15
What Did A Slave Auction Catalog Look Like?
Slate - 8/20/15
A Close Read of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”
Smithsonian - 8/10/15
Narrative Is Memory Is Life
Atlantic - 8/10/15
Video Games As Interactive Experiences With History
KQED - 8/7/15
How Much Should Politics Enter The Classroom, An Interview
NPR - 8/6/15
Digital Humanities: A Balanced Look At Moretti, Jockers
Boston Review - 8/3/15
Stanford Has An Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford - 8/2/15
On Using Board Games For Teaching History (Meaningfully)
History Tech - 7/31/15
Review: Why Did Europe Conquer The World?
Telegraph - 7/30/15
Writers Discuss Who Should Be Kicked Out Of The Literary Canon
New York Times - 7/28/15
3 Strategies For Teaching History’s Tragedies
Middle Web - 7/26/15
A Short History Of American English
Atlas Obscura - 7/17/15
“This Is Just To Say”: A Poem Becomes A Meme
New York Magazine - 7/16/15
This Language Has Only 123 Words In It
Atlantic - 7/15/15
Do We Really Want To Read Harper Lee’s Sequel To “Mockingbird”?
New York Times - 7/10/15
Art Makes Us Better: The Hospital Has A Writer-In-Residence
Harvard - 7/9/15
Comp Lit Prof + Math/CS Major + Pliny the Elder = Digital Humanities
New Yorker - 7/7/15
What Is American Culture? What Is The Role Of Cultural Literacy?
Atlantic - 7/3/15
8 Digital Humanities Projects From The Stanford Humanities Center
Stanford Humanities Center - 6/30/15
Arnold Toynbee: On The Need For The Humanities In A Digital World
Aeon - 6/25/15
How Schools Are Responding To The New Push For Non-Fiction
New York Times - 6/19/15
Romance Novels As Introductions To History?
NPR - 6/18/15
Every Possible Humanities Dissertation, Reduced To Tweets
New Yorker - 6/10/15
First Mexican-American Named US Poet Laureate
New York Times - 6/10/15
Algerian Kamel Daoud Writes Novel In Response To ‘The Stranger’
New York Times - 6/8/15
New Novel Reframes Charles Dickens As Thieving Innovator
Atlantic - 6/1/15
When Memory Is Caught Between Past and Present
New York Times - 5/18/15
On The Dearth Of Poetry Audiobooks
New York Times - 5/15/15
Against Historical Thinking?
Farnam Street - 5/11/15
New Mark Twain Stories Discovered
Guardian - 5/4/15
Links To Questions For Social Studies And History Teachers
History Tech - 5/1/15
The Ways We Tell Stories In A Digital Age
Medium - 4/16/15
Keywords In State Of The Union Address Over US History
Priceonomics - 4/16/15
How Will Our Language Evolve In The Coming Years?
The Week - 4/15/15
Poetry vs. Prose: What Makes This Distinction Possible?
Smart Set - 4/15/15
Distant Reading: After Close Reading
New Rambler Review - 4/13/15
Shakespeare's Sonnets: Dramatized in New York City
New York Times - 4/5/15
The Supreme Court Used To Be Filled With Senators, Not Judges
Atlantic - 4/1/15
Poetry And Different Kinds Of Truth
New Criterion - 4/1/15
Should The US Citizenship Test Be Required For A Diploma?
Boston Globe - 3/26/15
How The English Language Is Ruining Indian Literature
New York Times - 3/19/15
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave [video]
TED-Ed/YouTube - 3/15/15
Wittgenstein Was A Teacher, Too.
The Paris Review - 3/5/15
25 Maps That Show The Origin And Spread Of English
Vox - 3/3/15
Philology: The Lost Origin of the Humanities
New Criterion - 3/3/15
Philosopher: Do Schools Teach Moral Facts? Commenters Descend.
New York Times - 3/2/15
Eric Foner’s New Book On The Underground Railroad
Atlantic - 3/1/15
Gerrymandering Made Clear, Visually
Washington Post - 3/1/15
Excerpt from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Memoir That’s Sweeping the US
New York Times - 2/25/15
A Modern Day Chaucer, On Love. (Yes, In Middle English)
NPR - 2/14/15
More On Harper Lee And The Sequel To “To Kill A Mockingbird”
New York Times - 2/3/15
Harper Lee To Publish Sequel/Prequel To To Kill A Mockingbird
Smithsonian - 2/3/15
Language Evolution Mirrors Genetic Evolution
Stanford - 1/30/15
Tribute To A High School English Teacher
Slate - 1/29/15
In Short Term Culture, Historical Thinking Is Increasingly Important
New Statesman - 1/29/15
Poetry as Medicine? Welcome, The Medical Humanities.
Times Higher Education - 1/22/15
Who Was Chaucer? Why Did He Write The Canterbury Tales?
Spectator - 1/17/15
Hymn to Teaching English
The Millions - 1/16/15
Memorizing Poems: The Value Of Spoken Words In Modern Times
Poetry Magazine - 1/5/15
How Will Languages Evolve in the Coming Century?
Wall Street Journal - 1/2/15
The Narrative Arc of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Harvard - 1/1/15
Famous Writers Play Taboo [Humor]
New Yorker - 1/1/15
Should Non-Standard English Be the Standard?
Guardian - 12/31/14
In Defense of Homer
New York Times - 12/28/14
An Argument For Teaching More Fairy Tales
New Statesman - 12/22/14
On Historical Thinking And The Importance Of Practicing Research
American Scholar - 12/10/14
On the Psychology of ‘Serial’: A New Audio Serial Story
New York Magazine - 12/5/14
Should the Supreme Court Archive Justices’ Personal Papers?
New Yorker - 12/1/14
“Reading Like A Historian,” An Approach To Teaching History
Stanford - 11/26/14
Let’s Reconcile Highbrow and Lowbrow Culture
Pacific Standard - 11/25/14
Shakespeare First Folio Found in Small Library in France
New York Times - 11/25/14
Arundhati Roy: On Politics, A New Book, And More
Guardian - 11/23/14
Nat’l Book Award Winner on Writing as Art, Not Commodity [Video]
National Book Foundation/YouTube - 11/20/14
Helen Vendler On The Need For More Humanities Students
New Republic - 11/20/14
Telegraph Literature. Who Knew It Was (so Relevant) a Genre?
Slate - 11/11/14
Junot Diaz and Other Writers Look Back at Their Early Work
New York Times - 11/6/14
20 Ways to Read a Poem
Atlantic - 11/2/14
In the Digital Age, Some Colleges Are Doubling Down on Humanities
Huffington Post - 10/31/14
Was The Constitution Written To Create American Kings?
Wall Street Journal - 10/23/14
Young Adult Fiction: Gateway or Quicksand?
New Yorker - 10/22/14
Fight Short-Term Thinking: Study History
Brain Pickings - 10/16/14
How Shakespeare’s Verse Works on the Brain
Nautilus - 10/9/14
4 Reasons to Read Great Literature
Brain Pickings - 10/9/14
Why Historical Perspective Is Crucial In Decision-Making
Aeon - 10/2/14
Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” at 50 Years Old
Pacific Standard - 9/30/14
What is “Good Taste” When Talking About Books?
New York Times - 9/16/14
Your Class Can Transcribe Historical Documents for the Smithsonian
Wall Street Journal - 9/11/14
Big History, Bill Gates, and Changing Education
New York Times - 9/7/14
Understanding Metaphor. Scientists Join Writers to Find Out More
Chronicle of Higher Education - 9/1/14
John Updike’s Trash Was Another Man’s Treasure
Atlantic - 8/28/14
Why Is History Worth Studying and Teaching?
New Yorker - 8/28/14
Remembering (Celebrating) Sentence Diagramming
NPR - 8/22/14
Researcher: Harry Potter and Game of Thrones Influence Your Values
New Statesman - 8/19/14
Nicholas Kristof Advocates for the Humanities
New York Times - 8/14/14
Was Shakespeare a Political Conservative?
Atlantic - 8/5/14
What Happens When Ira Glass Tweets “Shakespeare Sucks”?
Kottke - 7/28/14
Can We Study Video Games Like We Study Novels?
KQED - 7/17/14
Why Humanities Reading Shouldn’t Happen on Screens
Chronicle of Higher Education - 7/14/14
In a Global Age, Are World Literature and Local Literature the Same?
Financial Times - 7/11/14
Shakespeare vs. Milton: Who’s Best? A Two-Hour Debate & Reading
YouTube/Intelligence Squared - 7/8/14
Milton, Locke, and Freedom of the Press--err... Internet
Chronicle of Higher Education - 7/8/14
Can We Allow Ourselves to Accept Rap as Poetry?
Daily Beast - 6/29/14
Tips for Reading from Textbooks
Edutopia - 6/27/14
A Radical Approach to Poetry, and Curriculum
New York Times - 6/14/14
Charles Wright Named US Poet Laureate
Washington Post - 6/12/14
Trigger Warnings, the UCSB Shooting, and How We Handle Trauma
New Yorker - 6/9/14
Calling Out the Doomsayers on “The Death of the Humanities”
Atlantic - 6/6/14
A Curated List of War Writing by Women
LA Review of Books - 5/26/14
What is Cultural Literacy in a Digital Age?
New York Times - 5/24/14
No, Trigger Warnings Are Another Form of Censorship
Guardian - 5/20/14
Should Schools Warn Students About Violent Content in Literature?
New York Times - 5/17/14
Is Teaching Ethical Behavior Really Possible Through Classes?
Stanford News - 5/13/14
Critique the Digital Humanities; It’s Our Intellectual Responsibility
New Republic - 5/2/14
What Does Junot Diaz Teach MIT Students In Literature Classes?
Salon - 5/2/14
Alan Lightman on Our Relationship with Nature
New York Times - 5/2/14
Gopnik and Gilbert Discuss the “Great American Novel” [podcast]
New Yorker - 4/14/14
Schools Still Ban Books? Oy.
Guardian - 4/14/14
Beyond 1984: Other Literary Metaphors for our Information State
Atlantic - 4/9/14
Shakespeare: Better on the Stage or Page?
Guardian - 4/8/14
Shakespeare’s Plays in 3 Panel Webcomics [humor]
io9 - 4/6/14
On “Like,” Language, and Enrichment Through Slang
New York Times - 4/5/14
New Book Details Climate Change’s Impact on Walden
Times Higher Education - 4/3/14
Why Languages Die, and Why We’re Witnessing a Mass Extinction
Vice - 4/1/14
NY Public Library Puts 20,000 Maps Online For Free
Open Culture - 3/31/14
Shakespeare’s March Madness: 32 Plays, Just One Winner [Humor]
NPR - 3/30/14
What Does “Digital Humanities” Mean?
New Yorker - 3/20/14
A New Approach to Literary Criticism
New Yorker - 3/20/14
What Is the Role of the Canon Today?
New York Times - 3/18/14
Contemporary Writers Weigh the Value of the Canon
New York Times - 3/18/14
Overused Words: “Actually” on the Rise, “Indeed” Going Down
New Republic - 3/16/14
Who Knew That Teddy Roosevelt Was Such a Prolific Reader?
Farnam Street - 2/28/14
Rebecca Goldstein: Why Study Philosophy?
Atlantic - 2/27/14
Why Storytelling is the New Startup Skill Set
ReadWrite - 2/25/14
Does Literature Makes Us More Moral, or Does it Define Morality?
Boston Review - 2/24/14
Grammar is Dead. Long Live Grammar!
Prospect Magazine - 2/20/14
Against “Dead Poets Society”, And In Defense Of Rigor
Atlantic - 2/19/14

"But many people… like their poetry, as the Car Talk guys would say, “unencumbered by the thought process.” There’s a reason there’s no Dead Novelists Society: for poetry, in the public imaginary, is the realm of feeling rather than thinking, and the very epitome of humanistic study. To understand how preposterous and offensive this stipulation is, turn it around. Imagine what would happen if we suddenly insisted that physics professors were ruining the beauty and mystery and wonder of the natural world by forcing students to memorize equations.”
Can We Get Over the Great American Novel Already?
LA Times - 2/18/14
We Can’t Agree On the Structure of Stories
Farnam Street - 2/17/14
There’s an App Called “Hemingway” that Analyzes Your Prose
Hemingway App - 2/16/14
Long Live The Great American Novel
Salon - 2/16/14
Only 3% of Literature in the US is Translated From Other Languages
Pacific Standard - 2/11/14
Saving Public Broadcasting Footage from the 20th Century
Atlantic - 2/7/14
Can Hi-Resolution Images Change the Way We Teach History?
Fast Company - 2/6/14
Frost’s Correspondences to Be Released
New York Times - 2/4/14
Defining a “Classic” is Like Defining the Canon
Salon - 1/29/14
Viking Social Networks Were Just Like Ours
Nautilus - 1/21/14
What Aristotle Can Teach Us About Modern Headlines
New Yorker - 1/21/14
Is Anglo-American Literature Isolated and Narrow-Minded?
Guardian - 1/20/14
Surprise! Frequent Texting Doesn’t Erode Writing Skills
Pacific Standard - 1/16/14
Crisis in the Humanities is Global
Wall Street Journal - 1/7/14
A Case for World Literature
Public Books - 1/6/14
2013 Word of the Year: “Because”
New York Times - 1/5/14
The New Yorker Revisits Don DeLillo
New Yorker - 1/3/14
Is the Permanence of Literature Changing?
Slate - 1/1/14
The Search for the Great American Novel Is Alive and Well
Harvard Magazine - 1/1/14
The Book Re-Imagined... in a Very Non-Digital Way.
Globe and Mail - 12/28/13
Two-Sentence Stories About the Holidays
Salon - 12/25/13
An Economic Argument for Majoring in English
New York Times - 12/21/13
Students Use Instagram to Stage Scenes from Hamlet
New York Times - 12/19/13
Explaining the Strange Grammar of Christmas Songs
Slate - 12/19/13
Form and Freedom in Poetry
New York Review of Books - 12/19/13
The OED Blog is full of Logotrivia, like Words Born in your Birth Year
OED - 12/13/13
Threat to Humanities is Global
New York Times - 12/2/13
Are the Humanities in Trouble? (Maybe, But Here’s a New View.)
New York Times - 11/30/13

“For those with humanistic and artistic life interests, our economic system has almost nothing to offer.”
Neuroaesthetics and the Future Science of Literature?
New York Times - 11/29/13
Secret Salinger Story Manuscripts Leak Online
Guardian - 11/28/13
Literature is Useful. It Teaches Empathy.
New Yorker - 11/6/13
Literature Shouldn’t Have to Be Useful. People Love Books. That’s Enough.
New Yorker - 8/27/13
Is The Pace Of Life Accelerating? Quotes From The 1890s…
xkcd - 6/19/13
What F. Scott Fitzgerald Thought Of The Great Gatsby
Big Think - 5/27/13
“My Grading Scale For The Fall Semester, Composed Entirely Of Samuel Beckett Quotes”
McSweeney’s - 8/31/12

“We wait. We are bored. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. The confusion is not my invention.”
Student Asks Famous Writers: “Is Symbolism Intentional?”
The Paris Review - 6/15/12
A Young Ian McKellen Close Reads Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow’ Speech
YouTube/RSC - 5/24/12
Phillip Pullman on Fairy Tales and Belief
New Statesman - 12/13/11
Pinsky On Misremembering Poetry, And Learning From Failure/Mistakes
Slate - 11/1/11
“Why Shakespeare Never Fails To Get Brains Buzzing”
Guardian - 4/21/11
On the Value of Reading Drama
Slate - 10/9/10
A Recording of Virginia Woolf Talking About Words And Language
BBC/YouTube - 12/2/07
National Humanities Center Free Humanities Webinar, Schedule
National Humanities Center

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