In the assault on American academic life, not even the Ivy League is safe. Following the Trump administration’s attacks on the university over supposed antisemitism, Harvard will drastically cut back on PhD admissions over the next two years across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
Writing about the Sokal affair in a preview from our upcoming issue, Bruce Robbins considers why conservatives are so eager to see academics taken down a peg—and how the fight for Palestinian liberation brought together the affair’s titular physicist and the editors of the magazine he so famously hoaxed. Elsewhere in the beleaguered culture industry, Sean Hooks talks to Ilya Gridneff and Helen DeWitt about what it took to publish their long-simmering novel, Your Name Here.
“Over nearly twenty years we have bonded by sharing similar levels of disdain for modernity/postmodernity and being aggrieved by various slights and injustices pitted against us.”
“The relationship between MAGA state power and Big Tech is perhaps better understood as volatile attempts at mutual containment, underwritten by a common commitment to imperialist dominance.”
“Consciously or not, most of us have topics that are off-limits—subjects we stay away from for different reasons, whether moral, aesthetic, or personal.”
“We are in thrall to the fetish of progress: the belief that history has a direction and a purpose, the faith that humankind is ascending a steady if circuitous route to greater and greater perfection.”
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