Simon During

Opinion | The Theory That Endangers the Humanities A social-scientific approach has risks. But humanists can’t just leave it behind.

An extract from my and Amanda Anderson’s pathbreaking (though I say it myself) new book Humanities Theory. This section on sociology’s understanding of the humanities and its dangers.

Vico: “Monarchy is the government that most conforms to human nature, in the ages when reason is the most developed.”

College Bankruptcies Are Coming In October, I attended a dinner in Washington, D.C., organized by the Center for Economy and Society (SNF Agora) at the Johns Hopkins University and the Niskanen Center on the subject of what American...

Online asynchronous education is not going to survive the AI era. Colleges and universities that double down on small classes, expertise, and real mentorship will be the ones that flourish.
www.chronicle.com/article/coll...

Looks good

The cynicism, cruelty and lies that now define Israel are infectious. The US is certainly infected by them.

Roadrunning: Joshua Clover in Conversation with Alex Abramovich November 10, 2021 – Emails about rock ’n’ roll freedom, American capitalism, and automobiles.

Ah god dammit. Joshua Clover wrote about both people and music as if he loved them so much he couldn’t bear it, & indeed he really did love them like this, to the joy of those he knew & shaped, & to the consternation of those who loved either less. What a loss. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/11...

Best @thejuicemedia.bsky.social ad yet! Hilarious, sponsored by Gina’s portrait🤣
Let’s get the dick out of Dickson👊🗳️
#Auspol #Ausvotes2025

Ryan Ruby’s latest?

They have more power in the end

Palestinian paramedics shot by Israeli forces had hands tied, eyewitnesses say

The view from our Berlin apt just now.

Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories: two novels (this ed 1945). This is one of the few volumes I long lusted for before I acquired it. It is such a handsome thing. Then I came across it quite by chance in Balfour Books, one of Toronto’s best used bookstores, while attending a conference there.

The sooner Musk gets his ass to Mars the better.

I believe the world’s moral compass will one day be restored.

Didier Eribon, Retour a Reims (1980). A famous (Bourdieuean) reflection on/theorization of the author’s life (a provincial queer working class lad’s rise up the academic ladder into the petit bourgeoisie) as triggered by a trip back to his home town upon his dad’s death. Interesting, very French.

Not sure how anti-authoritarian Ukraine is in the end. It is still very corrupt, billions are being siphoned off by war profiteers who will likely become the next generation of the oligarchs who originally put Zelensky into power.

The Ukraine situation doesnt in fact divide into a good guys v bad guys scenario and we should resist slipping back into cold war melodrama thinking.

The last dated Gertrud Kauders drawing we have. So cool!

C.P. Snow, Death under Sail (1932). Nice cover, lousy book. What a creep was C.P. Snow!

Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors. I have vivid memories of reading this book, astonished, on the London Northern Line in the days I worked in advertising in Hyde Park and lived on Parliament Hill. “Baron in the Trees” in particular really got to me, and it remains an ur-text.

Advice on Marriage. TO YOUNG LADIES. 1. Do not marry at all. 2. But if you must, avoid the Beauty Men, Flirts, and the Bounders, Tailor's Dummies, and the Football Enthusiasts. 3. Look for a Strong, Tame Man, a Fire-lighter, Coal-getter, Window Cleaner, and Yard Swiller. 4. Don't except too much, most men are lazy, selfish, thoughtless, lying, drunken, clumsy, heavy-footed, rough, unmanly brutes, and need taming. 5. All Bachelors are, and many are worse still. 6. If you want him to be happy, Feed the Brute. 7. The same remark applies to Dogs. 8. You will be wiser not to chance it isn't worth the risk

Ladies… this advice, written on marriage in a pamphlet by a suffragette in
1918 is still relevant today 🤣
It is currently on display at the Pontypridd Museum in Wales.

My Secret Life (1966). The famous (or just once famous?) Victorian male hetero porn book which the late great Steven Marcus edited and brought back into circulation, upon which I think it became something of a bestseller. One of the more, how to put it?, perverse pathways into 19thc England.

A Gertrud Kauders work on paper

So this is what it is like

BCharles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (1944) I’ve vague memories of reading this bestseller in my adolescence and think I saw the movie too. If my memory is sound, the dustjacket here isn’t very appropriate. But pb publishers of the period weren’t concerned with the fit between the jacket and the work

Gorey's envelopes event

Launch event for From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey TONIGHT (6:30) at @strandbookstore

Tom Fitzharris, the recipient of these letters, will be speaking with Robert Greskovic, a noted dance critic and longtime friend of Gorey's.

www.strandbooks.com/events/event...

Politics is a mugs game. But we are all mugs.

Kirsty Bell, The Undercurrents. I enjoyed this as most people interested in Berlin will. An American art-historian’s divorce lands her with a largish building beside the Landwehr canal and she becomes obsessed by its past. Fascinating.

Forceful detailed essay on Germany’s profoundly disturbing failure to acknowledge what is going on in Israel

Can we please just put Bob Dylan out of our lives? How hard would that be? He deserves a rest.