Humanities and Arts news

How do you teach a child reverence for nature? This filmmaker takes his son on a search for the ever-changing snow line

- by Aeon Video

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Our planet was once a harsh, alien, icy world. Yet this deep freeze may have shaped you, me and all life on Earth

- by Graham Shields

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Good institutions are social technologies that scale trust from personal relations to entire nations. How do they work?

- by Julien Lie-Panis

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David’s handcrafted figurines pay tribute to cultural icons. His latest project takes on his greatest hero, his late brother

- by Aeon Video

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In their visions of the underworld Dante and Milton were truly subversive, incorporating predecessors into their own repudiation

- by Charlie Ericson

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A jaunty song calls for greater appreciation of Indian wool, as imports undermine the livelihoods of local herders

- by Aeon Video

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The vision of solarpunk: joining nature with technology in vibrantly inclusive ways to create a world that truly blooms

- by Yogi Hale Hendlin

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Is time a property of the Universe? Yes, if you conceive of it as heat: a mind-boggling yet oddly comforting perspective

- by Aeon Video

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Sea pandas or sadistic killers? These enigmatic creatures invite contradictory labels that say far more about us than them

- by Jason Colby

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An age-old debate about human nature is being energised with new findings on the tightrope of cooperation and competition

- by Jonathan R Goodman

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In a public letter, Cuban artists and writers criticize the longstanding U.S. economic embargo for causing a humanitarian crisis.

Paglen took to Instagram to note the link between his 2024 and 2025 shows, which explored the history of UFO photography, and the new Spielberg film.

Police discovered part of the stolen haul in a camper van, including a 2,600-year-old wooden cat figure from Egypt’s 26th Dynasty.

The displays referring to Washington's ownership of enslaved people were removed by the Trump administration.

Her appointment signals a desire for renewal at an institution that has struggled in recent years.

Viola is claiming that the board of directors did so after he raised concerns with working conditions at the museum.

“The removal of legally protected artistic expression from a university gallery contradicts the institution’s own commitments to academic freedom, constitutional principles, and the open exchange of ideas fundamental to higher education,” the letter reads.

The museum distanced itself from a pro-Israel group that claimed it played a role in the decision.

This past week, Paul Slocum celebrated 20 years of And/Or gallery, a pioneering space for the exhibition of new media art.

Here's what we're reading this morning, folks.

Members of the creative community share their views on the platforms that once promised connection but increasingly deliver only exhaustion. There was a time when social media felt like a gift to...

A storybook serif, a Swiss workhorse and a riot of colour: we explore the typographic thinking behind UnitedUs's rebrand of Buttle UK. When a charity's biggest problem is that it's too quiet, you...

The filmmaker and creative director's work in set design is a masterclass in craft, personal storytelling and adapting visuals for different spaces. There's a moment in Michael Morpurgo's Pinocchi...

The Brooklyn-based tattoo artist has built an international practice on a radical premise. Clients bring feelings, not mood boards, and he does the rest. There's a running joke in the creative ind...

Three award-winning creatives explain how the Royal College of Art transformed their practice, their confidence and their sense of possibility. Applying for a master's is a big decision. When it m...

The Birmingham designer's "anti-placement placement" is part bootcamp, part studio safari, part masterclass in confidence. When a design student lands a placement, they typically know how it goes....

Feeling trapped in the middle? Here's how to navigate the murky waters between junior and senior when the path forward isn't clear. Welcome to another edition of Dear Boom, our advice series where...

In an age of AI-generated everything, Aardman is celebrating its half-century by pairing plasticine with a live orchestra. And there's a lesson in that for all of us. If you look closely at Wallac...

The famous illustrator, artist and DJ, along with Wild in Art, has launched a new trail that spotlights 21 brilliant creatives, turning Manchester's streets into a vibrant showcase of local talent....

Can they resist designing their own big days? Or is the occasion too irresistible to style? We find out from three leading creatives how they approached their own weddings. Most graphic designers...

10″ – Futura Resistenza

There are many precedents in music on the theme of lamentation, which has its roots in ancient funeral traditions and expressions of collective grief. These compositions, widespread in many cultures, have given voice to mourning and →

Mario Santamaría’s Emerald Black Latency is a project that explores the representation and material dimension of data circulation on the Internet, as well as the speculative aspect of an object that is real, but impossible to perceive in its entirety. →

CD – MFR Contemporary Series

‘Man-machine, semi human being, man-machine, superhuman being’. Kraftwerk imagined our cybernetic age in 1978 and the relationships we can perceive between the human and the algorithmic are influenced by such sci-fi premonitions. They cannot be →

Planetary Listening, book+cassette, ISBN 978-3000788598, English, 80 pages, 2024, Germany

Swamps & Stars was a series of events by artists and researchers from Berlin and other cities that explored ‘the vibrations between swampy spaces and the cosmos’. →

5CD – Macro

Sound waves that transport us on a journey without a destination, a continuous exploration of reverberation as an expressive medium, primary material used in a range of combinations, divided into 5 CDs, each lasting an hour. On →

Inspired by the folk tale ‘The King’s Ears Are Donkey Ears’, Jun Hyoung San’s exclusive disjunctions#2; Whispering of the Wind (wish) is an installation whose structure with sixteen moving antennas resembles a bamboo forest, each with a loudspeaker attached to →

Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Kunsthalle Wien and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, catalogue, ISBN 978-3753307343, English, 224 pages, 2024, UK

This publication is a catalogue of an important exhibition curated by →

CD – No Type

The meeting between Érick d’Orion and Martin Tétreault has given rise to a collaboration that unites two distinct but complementary approaches, developed over a long period of militancy in unconventional music scenes. d’Orion made his name →

Halfway between a kinesthetic game and the cybernetic representation of a choreography, I/Another, the interactive installation conceived by Animaspace – the artistic practice of Angelina Kozhevnikova, artist, designer and interdisciplinary researcher – actually poses a great challenge: universal dialogue. From →

University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 978-1517915223, English, 328 pages, 2024, USA

In the post-digital age, our idea of cinema is still that of a sequential movie whose only interactivity relates to the space and time →

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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