It's Academic

“Throughout the history of American higher education, the academic library has supported the university in its academic mission,” Dr Stephen E. Atkins writes in The Academic Library in the American University. Noting its evolution over three-and-a-half centuries, the former president of the American Library Association continues, “The academic library has become a depository of materials that support faculty and graduate student research in an almost infinite variety of disciplines.” For my part, I shall be forever grateful to the academic libraries of Brazil for that is where I found my beloved wife, a reference librarian in the humanities.

The Mass Grave of Reflection

Whether it is through the ascending drumbeats for war or the steady drone of mindless advertisements, the empty slogans that assail our senses are constant reminders that we live in a time when critical thinking was never more needed or practised less often. As Carl Jung observes in The Undiscovered Self, “The mass crushes out the insight and reflection still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to a doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.” The day America´s Constitution dies, her once noble experiment as a democratic republic dies with it. Sic transit gloria Americae.

Practically Abandoned by One’s Friends

Whence, where, and why the English major? Adam Gopnik asks in the New Yorker, noting its impending demise like the Latin prerequisite before it ― “a dying choice bound to a dead subject.” Despite his sympathies, Gopnik finds the apologias of the discipline's defenders unpersuasive, mocking “The Economic Case for Saving the Humanities” proffered by Brown University’s Christina Paxson as “the kind of Letter to a Crazy Republican Congressman that university presidents get to write.” Like most pragmatic parries, it surrenders the tradition’s essence in the vain hope its accidents might carry the day or, at least, prolong the inevitable. Hardly surprising, given the bottom line for Paxson’s fellow economists: “Is it worth it?” ― not the best way to defend the intrinsic worth of the humanities, even in an age that abhors such “useless knowledge.”

Buzzwords Drone On

Veteran readers may recall our calling attention to the problem of word inflation. Buzzwords are a prime culprit, and when they become so pervasive they’re virtually inaudible, we should start listening, as Judith Shulevitz, science editor of  the New Republic, reminds us. Take disruptive, which permeates cliché-ridden venues like the platforms at TED talks and the pages of Forbes. "Disruptive doesn’t mean what it used to," she notes. "It’s no longer the adjective you hope not to hear in parent-teacher conferences. It’s what you want investors to say about your new social-media app" ― ah, there's the rub. For additional examples of insufferable argot, read her essay.

Dead to the World Around Them

When I was as young as the lad to our left, I walked the streets of Olneyville, my nose buried in a book, oblivious to all but the occasional blare of horns waking me from my contemplation. Today, as Wayne Curtis writes in The Smart Set, the eyes of digital zombies are fixed on screens, not paper pages, but the risks of collateral damage remain the same. "From time to time, they will glance up and a brief squall of confusion will cross their faces as they try to reorient themselves. ... They wander into streets and traffic as if no cars or other hazards exist in their parallel universe." The hazards of substituting texting for reading ― or conversation, for that matter ― is a subject for another time.

Building Blocks of English: Affixes

Affixes are building blocks of language. The four types are prefixes, suffixes, combining forms, and infixes. We are familiar with prefixes, which placed at the beginning of words qualify their meaning (inappropriate) and suffixes, which convert the stem into another part of speech (celebrate to celebration). Combining forms, which can be either prefixes or suffixes, add another layer of meaning to words (biochemistry; pesticide). The least common affixes are infixes, which are placed within a word (in this case, to form the plural cupsful).

A Literary Triple Play

In the fall of 1874, William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, importuned Mark Twain for something to put in its columns for the coming year. Twain at first demurred; then passed on the suggestion of his closest friend, the Reverend Joseph Hopkins Twitchell, to write about Clemens' piloting career on the Mississippi river. The result, as they say, is history. As John T. Flanagan wrote for Minnesota History in 1936, "It is interesting to note that neither the conception of nor the early stimulus for one of Mark Twain's greatest books was original with the author." Mark Twain on the Upper Mississippi  Cf. The Lincoln of Literature: Mark Twain, The Atlantic, and the Making of the Middlebrow Magazine

Laughing at our Losses

As Prof. Michael Saler observes in a recent book review, Silicon Valley is the seedbed of a 21st-century ideology that's more readily mocked than negated. In To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov, dubbed by Saler today's H.L.Mencken, punctures the cyber-sect's banal platitudes in the most hard-hitting and sardonic critique published to date.

Laughter is often the last freedom of the vanquished, but considering the stakes at hand, it is no time for defeatism for defenders of a more human and humane culture. As a college basketball coach might urge his players, read and react!

Rolling the Dice on Artificial Intelligence

In 2009, Henry Markram boldly proposed to create a computer replica of the human brain within a decade. Fellow neuroscientist Haim Sompolinsky at Hebrew University of Jerusalem calls the idea a fantasy. Will Markram succeed in replicating human consciousness, a challenge that has stymied researchers in Artificial Intelligence? At a time when austerity is being imposed at dire human cost across Europe, the European Union is betting $1.3 billion on it, while the United States contemplates it own multibillion-dollar project.

Lethal Loneliness

"The problem is not that I am single and likely to stay single," confided Charlotte Bronte, "it is that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely." Psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann is best known ― or rather unknown ―as the "Dr. Fried" of  an erstwhile patient's autobiographical I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Her thoughts on The Science of Loneliness merit our consideration in an age in which we increasingly occupy ourselves with trivial pursuits to escape our essential loneliness.

Celebrating a Half Century of Excellence

"If anything, it was an intellectual community. It was people we knew and admired: a community of writers we knew but who hadn't come together in that way before, except for some of the critics who wrote for the Partisan Review. It was determined by friendships, by a shared belief in uncompromising quality in writing, and by a sense that much conventional criticism was superficial and lazy, accepting the mediocre." Robert Silvers, founding editor of the New York Review of Books, discusses its history as we celebrate its 50th anniversary. See Mark Danner's interview in New York for additional insights. 

Farmers Market to Mens Department?

Does the increasing use of "farmers market" lead to "mens department"? Perhaps,as grammar columnist and author June Casagrande suggests in a recent podcast, although I'm inclined to chalk it up to declining attention to, or even awareness of, proper English practice. The more salient question, of course, is this: Does the prevalence of "farmers market" justify your department store's use of "mens department," "womens shoes," and "childrens toys"? Absolutely not, as she clearly explains. It's worth a listen.