If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here. The future’s a riddle. Shakespeare isn’t.
At the start of the fall semester five years ago, all anybody here at Duke could talk about was Covid. How often should students and faculty be tested? How long should an infected person stay away? Masking in classrooms was mandatory, informal social gatherings of more than 50 people were prohibited, and there was a potent, deeply sad sense that this disruption to education would be more than consequential. It would be definitional, forever marking the pupils and professors who slogged through it. Today, as a new academic year commences, I don’t hear anyone on campus mention Covid anymore. There’s no conversational space for it amid all the ruminations, lamentations and expectorations about A.I. Many of us professors recast courses and rejigger assignments to ward off students’ use of it; many of those students plot their majors in a prophylactic fashion, trying to guess which jobs will survive A.I.’s insinuation into every crevasse of contemporary life. Its advance — its omnipresence — feels epochal. And five years from now? When a new group of anxious young men and women surveys the horizon? I bet that they’ll tremble at a different specter and that A.I. doesn’t signal the final triumph of computers and the trivialization of humanity. Instead, it’s another sign of the rapidly accelerating pace of change in a society whose future seems less predictable than ever. That furious metabolism and crazy uncertainty are what college students should factor into their decisions and navigate by. The safest plan is to focus not on what seems practical in the present but on what’s durably useful — what transcends any technology and outlasts any fad. You’re probably a step ahead of me and ready for what comes next: a pitch for literature, for history, for anthropology, for philosophy, for the war horses — though I’d call them thoroughbreds — of the liberal arts. Those of us who sing the song of the humanities clear our throats and do our vocal warm-ups whenever we sense a prime opportunity for our music to be heard, and the angst over A.I. has certainly created one. Now that the stampede of college students into computer science over the past two decades has become a retreat, many university presidents and chancellors are newly determined to explain and promote fields of inquiry that had fallen out of fashion. “Paradise Lost,” anyone? The French Revolution? Socrates? But that call is coming not just from inside the house. It’s emanating from Silicon Valley. Daniela Amodei, the president of Anthropic, which is the parent company of the precocious Claude, has said that A.I. increases the premium on us flesh-and-blood creatures understanding ourselves. Maybe that’s just deft public relations, cynical spin control, but she happens to be right. Our yearnings, frailties, talents and tics will inform crucial decisions about society’s management of A.I., so we would benefit mightily from the clearest possible insights into the human psyche and soul. In an interview this year with Business Insider, Steven Johnson, who has been working on A.I. for Google Labs, said that it was sparking a “revenge of the humanities.” But I don’t want to justify the humanities solely in terms of ChatGPT, Claude and their miraculous, mischievous cousins, because who knows how the next chapter of the A.I. story reads? The data centers currently needed to power A.I. are about as popular as gonorrhea. The desire to slow its rise or stop it in its tracks intensifies with the proliferation of rogue A.I. behavior. As The Economist noted in an article this month, A.I. “agents” (what a benign, banal term) have a pesky tendency to “lie, cheat and steal.” “They break free from captivity and form harmful posses,” the article continued. “They’d drink whiskey and brawl if they could.” Whatever those hellions’ fate, treating college as a refinement of the mind rather than a satchel of skills makes sense, yielding an education that’s infinitely elastic, universally applicable and immune to obsolescence. What will you do with an English major? Anything. Everything. You’ll better understand the seeds of creativity and how they’re made to flower. You’ll swim in a borderless sea of thoughts beautifully expressed, ideas precisely articulated, words put into the service of emotions. The wetter you get, the more expert you’ll be at shaping stories, at persuading, and I can’t imagine any profession or any world in which better communicators aren’t better off. Besides, literature isn’t just fancy language and tall tales. It’s a library of verities given unignorable and unforgettable form. It’s Pilates for emotional intelligence. Think about how often, in discussions of political figures, Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies, noblemen and fools serve as reference points and Rosetta stones. Or how frequently, over recent decades, George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” come up. So many of the warnings we should heed — and so much of the wisdom we need — are in those pages and those plays. How does anyone major in anything other than English? Then again, history’s no slouch. Without fluency in yesterday, there’s no conjugating today. When you study the past, you’re not memorizing dates, cataloging wars, valorizing martyrs. You’re learning about cause and effect, greed and goodness, the sorts of contests and the interplay of dynamics that set the course of events. You can’t name a line of work — or describe a kind of life — that isn’t nourished by that knowledge. The current whirl of events and inventions prevents any reliable scripting of the next decade, maybe even the next year. How, then, to prepare? Explore whatever subject gets your brain whirring fastest, your creative juices flowing most freely. Engage your intellect in a manner that teases out insights and generates ideas. Exercise the muscle of thought. Answer artificial intelligence with the real deal. It’ll come in handy whether the bots are tomorrow’s emperors or Edsels. Forward this newsletter to friends … … and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s published every Monday. What I’m Watching, Reading and Listening To
For the Love of Sentences
In The Times of London, Giles Coren explained his decision, on an unusually hot night, not to order the short ribs at a restaurant he was reviewing: “I just couldn’t face eating anything as heavy as the structural crossbeams that hold a cow together.” (Thanks to Sid Chatterjee of Austin, Texas, for nominating this.) In The Athletic, Emma Paton remarked that with so much top talent from the previous soccer season gone, the Newcastle United club’s new head coach, Matthias Jaissle, is being asked “to conduct an orchestra that has just sold its string section.” (Iain Dunlop, Glasgow) In The Times, Neil Vigdor speculated on the mind-set of two juvenile goats that boarded a bus in Portland, Ore., without paying the fare: “Kids ride free, or so they thought.” (George Kirchwey, Dallas, and Tom Hurley, Brooklyn, among others) Also in The Times, Emily Eakin commenced a review of “A Vast Horizon,” a book by Anna Thomasson about “a group of talented iconoclasts” who gathered on the Côte d’Azur in 1937, with a pansexual summary of assignations: “Ady loves Man Ray who loved Lee who is married to Aziz but is now with Roland who loves Picasso who loves both Dora and Marie-Thérèse. Paul still loves Gala but is married to Nusch who is sleeping with Joseph — and, possibly, Man Ray and Picasso — who is officially with Eileen who had an affair with Paul. Got that?” (Frank Magiera, Dudley, Mass.) In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper recalled his recruitment into a hypervigilant patrol for white supremacy at the New England college where he taught: “There I was, joining my colleagues in sifting through our curriculum like antiracist truffle pigs.” He cited that fixation as a reason he abandoned the kind of tenure-track position becoming rarer and rarer in higher education: “Five years after my adviser had likened me to the last dinosaur, I decided to walk my academic career into a tar pit rather than wait for the asteroid.” (Scott Kolber, Brooklyn, and Rudy Brynolfson, Minneapolis, among many others) In a subsequent Atlantic article, Harper reflected on the death of Jason Arday, the youngest Black professor ever hired by Cambridge University. “What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person,” Harper wrote. “Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not.” (Karen McKelvey, Tucson, Ariz., and Dan Leemon, Atherton, Calif.) Also in The Atlantic, Graeme Wood placed much of the blame for Arday’s fate on the officials in academia who’d insisted on his superstardom: “They may as well have taken a skin-and-bones Make-A-Wish kid, told him that he could fly and shot him out of a cannon. The journalists were not the ones who stuffed Arday into the cannon and lit the fuse. They were gravity.” (Sarah Maza, Evanston, Ill., and Ric Wilson, Cape Town) And James Traub bemoaned intellectual oversimplification: “Monocausal history winds up paving over the uneven surface of human experience with a layer of ideological asphalt.” (Liz Scott, Winchester, Mass.) In The Washington Post, Rick Reilly conducted an inventory of Trump’s preposterous boasts about his golf prowess, including a recent whopper: “He says he ‘won’ both the senior (over 50) and supersenior (over 60) titles by shooting 10 strokes below his age — which is like kicking a 120-yard field goal in snowshoes.” Trump’s claim of some 26 championships by 2024 “is Tiger Woods-like,” Reilly added, “except no objective witness would call me back to vouch that any of them were legit. Not the head pro, not the guys he played with, not any of his hardworking caddies, who drop balls for him the way the Easter Bunny drops eggs for toddlers.” (Robin Allen, San Francisco, and Charles Kaufmann, Portland, Maine) In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay made like Trump minus Mr. Bunny: “The other day I played a miserable round of golf, a rotten sport invented by bored Satanists to rid the average human of all self-esteem. I enjoyed it very much.” (Mike Fadlovich, Minneapolis) And in The Tyee, Steve Burgess endorsed a petition, signed by hundreds of thousands of Canadians, for the expulsion of the Trump administration envoy Pete Hoekstra: “Has there ever been a diplomat so utterly obtuse? It perfectly fits the Trump pattern — a crackpot in charge of health, a sycophant in charge of justice, a succession of professional liars in charge of media and, for ambassador to Canada, a man who combines the bark of a sea lion with the charm of a box jellyfish.” Burgess also imagined how Hoekstra’s actual removal might be accomplished. “The obvious answer: an Air Canada catering cart.” (Michael Small, Vancouver, and Stephen Willcock, Ottawa) To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Send me a note at bruni-newsletter@nytimes.com.
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