Asheesh Kapur Siddique

Another day, another union-bashing, anti-labor op-ed from the "liberal" New York Times, which is increasingly indistinguishable from the Wall Street Journal opinion page.

does this mean the humanities are dead or that they’re primed for a comeback?

The only reliable way anybody has found to keep a lit mag solvent is have the CIA fund it.

The Misuses of the University - Public Books Have the funds that might have trained the next generation of scholars at the nation’s first research university have been blown on ostentatious new buildings?

www.publicbooks.org/the-misuses-...

Photo of the “Tarses Family Toilets” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

I love when you go to a museum or a university and some donor has given money to put their name on the bathrooms. Gives a whole new meaning to the term “endowed chair” 😂

I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland.

And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.

The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us by Benjamin Recht

In The Irrational Decision, Benjamin Recht traces how the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality—& why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, & judgment.

Available March 10 (5 May UK pub).

Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

It was fairly well-covered in this excellent article last month by Jennifer Schuessler @nytimes.com - an important read about the happenings at the National Endowment for the Humanities #NEH

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/a...

Not that any of this is surprising - this is exactly what they said they were going to do - but nevertheless depressing.

I don't know if people have noticed, but Trump's NEH is funneling much of its limited resources to right-wing orgs - $10 mil to the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, $2 mil to right-wing mag First Things, millions to various "civic leadership" projects www.neh.gov/sites/defaul...

The website for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is completely scrubbed and gone! They didn't even leave a legacy statement.

Fully agree. And this could apply to research too: we reward metrics--how much did you write? How many citations? I even find myself asking, "am I reading fast enough?" But what's quantity worth in an age of AI? can we reorient around "what have I learned and thought and shared that really matters?"

“Halim first argues that the term ‘boneless wings‘ is ‘literally false‘ because the products are not wings. That’s debatable” www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/u...

This is correct. It’s sad that the logic of the neoliberal university - pack as many students into classes as possible, value disciplines based on many majors/enrollments they attract - militates against this.

It’s going to sound quaint, but the best way to resist an AI takeover of the humanities is to assign physical books, sit around, read them, and argue about ideas. Academic has become such a competitive arena, that we ourselves are trained to look for the winning angle, instead of the best education.

Screenshot of statement from Rep Marie Guesenkamp Perez on tying student debt forgiveness to investing in career/technical education. https://gluesenkampperez.house.gov/posts/rep-gluesenkamp-perez-statement-on-hjres-45

The hostility of elected Democrats to the idea that the humanities are for everyone is ample and well-documented. They really believe that working people attending public institutions should be trained for careers; the humanities are for those who go to Reed and Harvard.

She went to Reed, btw: gluesenkampperez.house.gov/posts/rep-gl...

I always point to Connecticut's state government, which is led by a Democratic trifecta and is *still* dismantling its public universities and especially targeting the humanities

As somebody that works at a public research university, this mentality is a) the biggest thorn in my side ever and b) actually deeply internalized by the universities themselves. Our black and brown kids are not allowed critical thinking. Only to be widgets in training for capital.

Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez Statement on HJRes 45 Today, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03) released the below statement after voting in favor for HJRes 45: “Expansions of student debt forgiveness need to be matched dollar-for-dollar with investmen...

gluesenkampperez.house.gov/posts/rep-gl...

Yes, but presumably you aren't and have not been an elected member of the House of Representatives or Senate for the last 30 odd years, because Democrats in both those bodies have done basically nothing to enhance the power of the NEH in those periods, and its those Democrats who count here.

The billionaires' eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science Edge - Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon - was sold to me as a gathering of the world's finest minds, writes Virginia Heffernan. The files reveal it was something far darker: a decades-lo...

NEW: Read this terrific piece @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social for @thenerve.news in which she unpicks Edge.org, the hugely influential 'salon' funded by Epstein & threaded through with race science & eugenics.
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www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

A right-leaning critique of academic neoliberalism

This is really a core problem that any true democratic humanism must confront head-on, and the task is to build out infrastructures for advanced humanistic study without need for buy-in from elite institutions or the rich people controlling them

The corollary to this: I've actually had a colleague - yes, an actual historian - say that we, in a public R1 history department, should not be hiring intellectual historians because "that's not what our students need." As if that's only for students at rich private institutions 😠

In other words, respect for serious study in the humanities is such an alarmingly minority position, even among the monied elites, that protecting the humanities at elite institutions is very hard. One of my "big brothers" in European intellectual history no longer take students - no jobs for them.

I think things are worse than this. To the extent that there's a dominant Dem view, it would be that education at Princeton and Harvard is explicitly education for power, not for Latin and Sanskrit, or that those are electives on a par with violin or performing in the Gilbert & Sullivan Society.

This elitist view that only rich/Ivy/private school kids should study/have access the liberal arts is so deeply ingrained in so many highly educated Democrats’ views (including tons who majored in the lib arts themselves) that they don’t even realize they hold it, let alone how ugly & elitist it is

(4) This leaves humanists in a bind because there is no political support for the idea of publicly funded curiosity driven humanities research. So how do we create that? How should a future Democratic administration rebuild the NEH?