reading

The New Yorker, 6 March issue, the one with the cover depicting DeSantis about to fillet a book.

Article on the decline in humanities majors in US universities, sees fit to explain what STEM stands for.

Article on the role of phosphorus in life and fertilizer, tells how important phosphates are to human biology but says nothing about what a phosphate is.

Article on using chatbots as mental health therapists. (The human ones are all booked up.) Meets a developer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and mentions as an aside that the lab "supplied plutonium to the Manhattan Project." Well, no. There was a pilot plutonium facility at Oak Ridge, but most of the plutonium came from Hanford. Oak Ridge's main role was to produce enriched uranium. The distinction makes no difference to the article, but if you're going to mention it, why not get it right? Or did a chatbot write the article?

The article on humanities majors interests me, because it shows the imperatives as having changed so much since my own university days nearly half a century ago. The increased cost of tuition and the increased difficulty of finding a well-paying job afterwards, both increasing the pressure to train for a hot career in engineering or the like, even for people who'd rather study literature.

Though it says it's about the humanities in general, the only field of study it discusses at all is English literature. There it loses me. I was a history major, which my univ classed as both humanities and social studies. I chose it both because I loved to read history and because of my excellent school training, with an Advanced Placement teacher who encouraged me to run rampant in doing research. My father had an adjunct position at the Stanford Medical School, so I was eligible to borrow books from the Stanford library, a privilege I took advantage of.

Whereas English lit - no. I hated that in school. Some authors I liked: I liked Shakespeare and Steinbeck. But I was forced to read Joseph Conrad, Hemingway, Dickens and Melville, as well as drippy nonsense like A Separate Peace, and I detested it all. Even worse was the directions for how to write about them. Not about the plot or the characters or the writing style, but the hidden symbolism: that was the only acceptable topic. The New Yorker article says that it's only recently that literary criticism has gotten hermeneutic, but this is how it actually was where I sat way back then. I got so fed up I wrote a paper denouncing this approach, rehearsing (had I only known it) the arguments in Susan Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation," which had been published a decade earlier. I got an F on the paper. As there was nothing wrong with my writing ability, this reflected my teacher's disapproval of my arguments, so I suspect she would also have given Sontag an F.

So no English major for me. Despite the university's requirement for a literature writing course, I got through my years without taking a single class from the English department (the secret was that other departments also gave qualifying courses). Thus I was much amused when, decades later, I was the guest lecturer for a university English department course. The topic, of course, was Tolkien, someone who would not have made the list in my day.