Humanities and Arts news

All our laws and rules to protect coral reefs now stand in the way of radical action to save them from heat death

- by Irus Braverman

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A dazzling visualisation of how the body’s specialised proteins repair damaged DNA by using an intact copy as a template

- by Aeon Video

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How the persecuted Vietnamese philosopher became one of the first theorists of the divide between colonised and coloniser

- by Rory O’Sullivan

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For a tar player, each strum offers a connection with Iranian classical music, some of which was lost after the revolution

- by Aeon Video

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For people with chronic illnesses, the relief and recognition of online communities can set up a toxic psychological trap

- by Siddhant Ritwick & Tomi Koljonen

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A documentary on the patient labour of building a home away from home and the courage it takes to open oneself to new bonds

- by Aeon Video

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A lush translation of this late-discovered lesbian poet added to the legacy of Sappho, but there was a trickster at work

- by Cat Lambert

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In a town park in Portugal, prizes dangle just out of reach up a greasy pole. How will the local teens manage to get them?

- by Aeon Video

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Politics today is driven by grievances that can never be assuaged. For democracy’s survival, we must grapple with this dynamic

- by Paul Katsafanas

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In rare interviews, Russians speak candidly about their lives in the presence of war – animated to protect their identities

- by Aeon Video

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The Fall 2025 grantees hail from 17 states and Washington, D.C., as well as Lebanon and Ukraine.

The 12-person tours will be offered in English and Italian and begin on Mar. 3.

The canvas from 1999 marked a turning point in the artist's career.

Bonhams auction house in London will hold a sale of books, photographs, and ephemera related to the Irish writer’s life and work.

Roger and Josette Vanthournout’s holdings also include examples by artists ranging from Picasso to Kusama.

Enter through the parking garage to skip the queue, says Met CEO Max Hollein.

It may be among the biggest sales ever of Western American art.

Three paintings with a combined high estimate of $155,000 are up for sale on January 27.

Four works by the former president are currently being auctioned by Christie’s.

She is one of around a dozen artists dropped by the gallery in the few months.

Your brain is a potato, your bank account is empty, and Mother Nature is begging you to hibernate. So why don't we listen? Many moons ago, in January, I did something pretty dumb. I sat down on th...

Built by Monotype, lingerie brand Chantelle Pulp's new logo is a shape-shifting identity. Variable fonts have been technically possible for years. Designers have marvelled at the control, the file...

People People's flexible branding system for a new retail incubator in Seattle unifies six independent businesses while preserving their distinct identities. As retail faces existential threats fr...

A new identity for the US healthcare app reflects a cultural shift towards agency, continuity and care that moves at the pace of real life. In the US, healthcare has a reputation for being many th...

The patchwork feel of the identity was chosen to celebrate the beauty and power of diversity, without distracting from the data itself. Pentagram is behind the visual identity for the UK's first t...

As the UK's HFSS restrictions take hold, food brands are losing their oldest emotional shortcuts. In this opinion piece, Loren Aylott of Manchester creative agency Dinosaur explores how the end of...

A new design-led cocktail book for Burma Burma Restaurant reframes non-alcoholic drinking as expressive, rebellious and anything but restrained, drawing on Burmese subcultures, travel journals and...

As running culture continues to grow in popularity, ASICS' latest global campaign leans into joy and unexpected lightness, pairing everyday exercise with a classic Beach Boys soundtrack. Running h...

Why does it take more people to complete a project than it used to? When Joy Nazzari, founder of DNCO, sat down for the Creative Boom podcast recently, she raised something that stopped me in my t...

When January arrives with an empty inbox and mounting bills, here's how to navigate the freelance drought without losing your mind. So it's 3am on a Monday in early January, 201-something, and I'm...

One of the fascinations with predictive software is its apparent complexity and inscrutability. John Wild builds on this concept and creates a new idea of AI software that aims for sustainable symbiotic relationships between machine and organic ‘intelligences’. With Interference →

Sternberg Press, ISBN 978-1915609632, English, 88 pages, 2025, UK

The Contemporary Condition book series explores the aesthetics and politics of ecosystems and the networked image as a ‘relational assemblage’, with slim yet dense books edited by →

CD – Constellation

This is the debut solo album from Swedish vocalist, composer and producer, Erika Angell. Resident in Montreal for over a decade, Angell is a musician who escapes characterisation, with sixteen independently produced albums and countless collaborations ranging →

Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm (also author of Illumination) is an artist who develops instruments that extend our cognition and our bodies to what we cannot consciously perceive. In collaboration with Kaj Nielsen, he developed SCAN, an array of rotating detectors with →

Set Margins’, ISBN 978-9083449821, English, 172 pages, 2024, The Netherlands

In the narrow field where artists have directly engaged with economic powers (such as Bureau d’Études), we can certainly include the systematic and intrepid work of →

CD – true blanking

Kjell Bjørgeengen, Keith Rowe and John Tilbury are three central figures in contemporary experimental music, each with a trajectory that has helped redefine adjacent fields. Bjørgeengen, a Norwegian visual artist, has revolutionised the dialogue between sound →

By abstracting AI prediction models that analyse past textual and visual productions to develop possible new or ‘future’ content, we can also elaborate a different past based on a more distant past. Miloš Trakilović develops this concept in 564 Tracks →

CD – Swarming

This is the first collaboration between Marc Baron and Eric La Casa, two leading figures in the French and international experimental sound scene. Baron is an electroacoustic composer and live performer, known for his unconventional approach to →

Springer, ISBN 978-3031474033, English, 186 pages, 2024, Germany

Following their earlier book Ciencia Abierta / Open Science, Marcelo Velasco and Ignacio Nieto, both from Santiago de Chile, have written an ambitious book about the perennially →

Viral Infection is an installation by Johannes Kiel. It uses machine nests to produce the PLA bioplastic they are made of and also calculates their production needs, while a ‘virus machine’ attempts to infect further hosts in order to multiply. →

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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