June 2021 – Thinking about the Humanities

how to live your best sabbatical life (installment #1)

June 28, 2021 admin

This afternoon, I re-learned the fact that if you are banging your head against a writing wall, you can just stop trying to work on the thing. You can doze off on the couch instead, for as long as your brains feel like sleeping. And then when you wake up, you can make yourself a brownie sundae, using the homemade strawberry-rhubarb sauce your friend gifted you recently, which has been sitting in your fridge just waiting patiently for someone to…

You’re not going to be an English, right? So what are you going to do?

June 23, 2021 Andrea Kaston Tange

People who gravitate towards subjects broadly contained under the label “the humanities” tend to do so because we are intellectually curious–because we love to read, debate, think deeply, learn, investigate. We don’t embrace the question “what are you going to do with that degree?” because we hear its unspoken premise that “that degree” is a “useless” one. Instead, we get defensive: inquiry itself is an end. There is value in learning. One does not have to quantify a job trajectory…