Humanities and Arts news

It is our biggest blind spot, a bizarre experience that befalls us every day, and can’t be explained by our need for rest

- by Vladyslav Vyazovskiy

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After 17 years of struggling with a heroin addiction, Raina finds a path to recovery through compassion and connection

- by Aeon Video

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Huge swathes of human knowledge are missing from the internet. By definition, generative AI is shockingly ignorant too

- by Deepak Varuvel Dennison

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Throughout decades of writing, Harold Rosenberg exhorted artists to resist cliché and conformity and instead take action

- by Blake Smith

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On a visit to her hometown in Iran, Elahe navigates delicate family dynamics as she chooses to leave her hair uncovered

- by Aeon Video

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The convergence of singular talent and profound disability confounded scientists eager to place humans into neat categories

- by Violeta Ruiz

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Take a tour of Haiti’s contemporary arts scene in this short documentary, led by some of its most celebrated artists

- by Aeon Video

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How do some countries manage to channel foreign capital into economic development while others are just exploited by it?

- by Guilherme Klein Martins

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What role, if any, does the observer play in fundamental physics? A cosmologist lays out the leading theories in the field

- by Aeon Video

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How can you have a picture of the world when your brain is locked up in your skull? Neuroscientist Dale Purves has clues

- by Asif Ghazanfar

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The painting will now go on view at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Wood said that Charli XCX's lyrics evince a "throwaway candor."

The iconic work was once spray-painted by Bono.

It marks the end of a very long road for Restellini.

The artists were previously represented by Kasmin.

In a statement made to Chicago local media, the museum called the allegations "outrageous and categorically false."

Despite the militant group agreeing to return all 28 bodies, only four have been recovered by Israel to date.

Universal Basic Income advocates argue the success of the program is evidence that the policy should be applied nationwide.

Actor Damian Lewis joined the institution in a plea to acquire the treasure found by an amateur detectorist in 2019.

The artist is now plotting his his Australian Pavilion after a period of controversy.

The cult London station unveils its first full rebrand, alongside a new app and DAB expansion, as it sets its sights on one million weekly listeners and puts its community of DJs at the heart of th...

These amazing artists are mixing tradition with tech, calligraphy with chaos... and the results are mesmerising. If you think of "Chinese illustration" as a single style, think again. From Shanghai...

Welcome back to Booms & Shakes, your monthly dose of industry moves, studio milestones and creative comebacks – all in one quick scroll. If September was all about comebacks, October feels lik...

The Brighton-based studio has created a new logo, typeface and visual language for Nike Football, channelling the brand's golden era while setting the stage for its next chapter. When Nike Footbal...

Brand writer Nick Carson has joined forces with NB Studio and SEA on a one-off artwork for the Bloomsbury Festival's 26 Bridges project – a palindromic poem-turned-distorting mirror that flips mean...

As uncertainty reshapes the industry, studios are betting on smarter processes, bolder thinking and deeper client partnerships. It's fair to say that, as we edge towards 2026, one word is dominati...

More than just a place to sleep, this Hoxton hotel is betting everything on becoming a genuine platform for creatives. Picture this: you walk into a hotel reception, but instead of corporate beige...

My visit to the Northern Festival of Illustration highlighted how a once-overlooked seaside town is becoming one of the UK's most exciting creative centres. Over the last few years, I've spent a l...

These six compelling case studies demonstrate how forward-thinking brands are leveraging the power of bespoke illustration to engage and entertain their audiences. Have you noticed how more and m...

With the help of Studio DRAMA, we explore why typography has shifted from a "nice-to-have" to a strategic necessity and why some myths about custom type deserve debunking. Once upon a time, a cust...

If social media had never existed, we don’t know if and when we would have had such a fragile media landscape where our judgement is essential to discern truth from falsehood. Mrinalini Singha & Haoheng Tang have developed a hybrid →

CD – Arjunamusic

The elegiac passages that open this release from Arjunamusic Records immediately take us back to the electronic music of yesteryear modulated in real time. A type of musical performance that in the pre-internet era was decidedly more →

CD – Room40

On Cursory Asperses, Celer offer auditory experiences built around water sounds from rivers, streams, lakes, beaches, and swimming pools. All were captured using cassette recorders and combined with various musical instruments including synthesizers, organs, cellos and pianos →

Sound walks have become a consolidated theory and artistic practice over time, with various acoustic devices enhancing or revealing participants’ listening abilities. In Embedded/Embodied, Farzaneh Nouri & Arash Akbari add a computational layer by training an artificial intelligence (AI) to →

LP+book – REV. Lab.

There are 24 tracks in under half an hour on Traces, the latest effort by Filax Staël, a collaborative project led by Bas Mantel and Okko Perekki – both of whom are well-versed in working →

CD – Futura Resistenza

The motivation behind this release from Nika Son was to support the director Helena Wittmann, who for her film Drift (released in 2017) needed a musical concept that was consistent with a wide range of narrative →

This immersive reality experience, Symbiosis, created by the Dutch experience design collective Polymorf in co-production with Studio Biarritz, unfolds in a specially designed physical environment. Drawing inspiration from the speculative worlds of Donna J. Haraway – participants can choose to →

CG-ARTS, ISBN 978-4903474717, Japanese, 802 pages, 2023, Japan

Within Japan, which still remains relatively inaccessible to the West, there has been a long-standing pronounced and outstanding tradition of the production of new media art. A →

CD + booklet – The Dim Coast

The first elaborations of this work by Canadian sound artist Christof Migone, date back to 2002, the year in which the Auditorium project began. There are five tracks – all recorded at different →

If ‘there are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew’, as McLuhan stated, where is the public opinion on climate change? Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (interviewed in issue #26) provides an answer with Climate Parliament, which consists of thousands of →

Open letter urges Labor to reverse JRG scheme, introduced by Coalition in 2021, as cost of humanities degrees reaches more than $50,000

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Tim Winton knows what it’s like to be the first in a family to go to university – “what a breakthrough that is, the kind of opportunities it provides”.

It was at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, studying arts, that he wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, launching a four-decade writing career.

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The future of public knowledge rests on building open-access LLMs driven by ethics rather than profit, writes Prof Dr Matteo Valleriani

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly entered the landscape of historical research. Their capacity to process, annotate and generate texts is transforming scholarly workflows. Yet historians are uniquely positioned to ask a deeper question – who owns the tools that shape our understanding of the past?

Most powerful LLMs today are developed by private companies. While their investments are significant, their goals – focused on profit, platform growth or intellectual property control – rarely align with the values of historical scholarship: transparency, reproducibility, accessibility and cultural diversity.

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Jim Endersby recalls how maths teachers responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s and likens it to current fears of AI use by university students

I agree with Prof Andrew Moran and Dr Ben Wilkinson (Letters, 2 March) that cheap and easy‐to‐use AI tools create problems for universities, but the reactions of many academics to these new developments remind me of the way some people responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s.

Reports of the imminent death of maths teaching in schools proved exaggerated. Maths teachers had to adapt, not least to teach students the longstanding rule “garbage in, garbage out”; if students had no idea of the fundamental principles and ideas behind maths, they would not realise their answer was meaningless. Today’s humanities teachers are going to have to adapt in similar ways.

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Arts and humanities are being hit hardest by cuts in higher education, write Prof Thea Pitman and Prof Emma Cayley, and Dr Ronan McLaverty-Head and another letter writer comment on cuts at Cardiff and another Russell Group university

In response to the shocking news predicting up to 10,000 imminent job losses across the UK higher education sector (Quarter of leading UK universities cutting staff due to budget shortfalls, 1 February), we write to flag up a fact that the article largely misses: the degree to which arts and humanities subjects are bearing the brunt of these cuts.

While the article singles out the loss of nursing courses at Cardiff University and the closure of chemistry courses across the country, it mentions the humanities just once in passing. Last week it was ancient history, modern languages, music, religion and theology at Cardiff University. Not so long ago, it was subjects including English, history, music and theatre at Goldsmiths, and art history, music, philosophy and religious studies at the University of Kent, to name just two. And with each passing week more arts and humanities courses and departments are cut.

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With degrees disappearing and reading rates plummeting, the arts face a critical moment in education and culture

The announcement that Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent is to stop offering English literature degrees has set several hares running, most of them in the wrong direction. The university said in effect that hardly anyone wanted to study English literature at degree level any more and the course was therefore no longer viable. If you can’t do EngLit in the city of Chaucer and Marlowe, where can you do it?

Canterbury’s tale is a familiar one. EngLit is in wholesale retreat at A level, with numbers down from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023, and there has been a decline at university, too, over the past decade, though statistics are disputed because the subject gets studied at degree level in many guises, including creative writing and linguistics. Overall, humanities subjects seem to be losing their appeal, with only 38% of students taking a course in 2021/22, down from nearly 60% between 2003/4 and 2015/16.

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A New York scholar’s study of our long history of acclaiming the fool and ignoring the facts is timely and terrifically witty

This is at once a wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit. Almost every one of the short sections into which the narrative is divided – and there is a narrative, cunningly sustained within what seems a relaxed discursiveness – takes careful aim and at the end hits the bullseye with a sure and satisfying aphoristic thwock.

The central premise of the book is simply stated: “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, New York, and the author of a handful of masterly studies of the terrain where political and intellectual sensibilities collide, is an acute observer of the vagaries of human behaviour and thought in general, and of our tendency to self-delusion in particular.

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Whatever their GCSE results, students should be told the whole story: understanding languages and cultures is a huge advantage in the workplace

I reflect on GCSE results day with a sense of pride tinged with sadness. Proud because this year’s cohort achieved fantastic results, given the challenges they have faced since the pandemic, but sad because for many it will be the last time they study humanities (languages, history and religious and classical studies) subjects.

I won’t hide my bias: I studied Spanish, history and philosophy and ethics at A-level, and Latin and religious studies at GCSE, so I’m a strong advocate for the humanities. Yet, they’re steadily becoming an unpopular choice, with only 38% of students taking at least one humanities course in the 2021/22 cohort compared to just under 60% from 2003/4 to 2015/16.

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Not only will literary criticism wither, but we risk losing the campus novel entirely

Ah, A-level results week, and how weirdly enjoyable it is when you’re not doing them yourself, have no children of your own in the game, and nieces and nephews who aren’t yet old enough. Out for a walk with my headphones, I listen delightedly as a triumphant candidate appears on the BBC’s World at One: Evie from Southend, who sounds as pleased as punch. What will she do now, asks the presenter, who also has a smile in his voice. She doesn’t miss a beat. It’s all sorted. In the autumn, she’ll go to Durham University to read... English literature.

This stops me in my tracks. What? Surely everyone knows that English literature is dying. Since 2012, the number of students reading it at university, as I once did, has fallen by more than a third; staff are being laid off, departments are closing, scholarship is missing in action. I’ve just read a “major” new study of the poet WH Auden, and, as I write in my review, its gargantuan size – you could more easily slip a hardback edition of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course into your handbag than this book – announces it as a relic even before publication. No, Stem subjects are where it’s at now, and my amazement at Evie’s “passion” for her course is going to take a full circuit of the park to fade.

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Government needs to promote the study of all disciplines to improve workforce skills, says Prof Jonathan Michie

Molly Morgan Jones, the director of policy at the British Academy, is right to warn that Michael Gove’s legacy is undermining workforce skills (A-level students choosing narrower range of subjects after Gove changes, 14 August). To contribute at work, and in society more generally, requires capabilities such as critical thinking, imagination and communication alongside technical skills. Humanities and social science are therefore vital, along with science and engineering.

Countless examples illustrate this. One is Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and others broke the enemy codes, developing in the process the world’s first digital programmable computer, Colossus. Surely a time to stick to maths and engineering? No, Bletchley recruited from all academic disciplines, with entrance exams including crosswords. (Full disclosure: my father, Donald Michie, was one, diverted to Bletchley from Balliol College, Oxford, where he’d received an open entrance scholarship to study classics.)

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Academics warn loss of higher education arts and humanities courses will harm understanding of racism and imperial history

Cuts to arts and humanities subjects within higher education will have damaging implications for our understanding of race and colonialism, academics have warned.

Petitions have been launched to save anthropology at Kent University, where the subject has come under threat of closure, while Oxford Brookes confirmed the closure of its music programme earlier this year.

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