The Humanities Are Not Dead, Just Adjusting
Rumors of Their Demise Miss Subtler Realities and Realignments
In his 1704 fantasy, The Battle of the Books, Jonathan Swift imagined a fight in a library. The opponents? New books vied with old books for supremacy, the classics against newfangled philosophy and science. In an updated version of the tale, books—of any age—would vie against test tubes, algorithms, servos, and pivot tables. And if a recent New Yorker …
