“In 2015, Harvard University Press began to publish the Murty Classical Library of India, a series of editions and translations of texts in a wide range of Indian languages, under the direction of Sheldon Pollock, professor of South Asian studies at Columbia University. In February, 2016, 132 academics in India petitioned to have Pollock removed as general editor. They were raising their voices not as subject experts — many were scientists or doctors lacking competence to judge humanistic scholarship — but as Hindus. Why did Hindus in India care what a publisher in Massachusetts was doing? Because Hindus in America cared, and they had sent word to India to raise the alarm there, too. This attempt by faith-based groups to control what scholars say is symptomatic of a broader clash between pious and academic ways of talking about religion, which has also troubled scholars who write and teach about religions other than Hinduism, and threatens freedom of speech in America, India, and elsewhere.”

Wendy Doniger, "The Repression of Religious Studies" - http://chronicle.com/article/The-Repression-of-Religious/236166

“Early researchers suspected right away that the Antikythera Mechanism was a mechanical sky chart of sorts—a machine that seemed to predict the position of celestial bodies, phases of the moon, and the timing of eclipses. But its mere existence was wildly anachronistic. The mechanism dated to around 200 B.C., yet nothing approaching its workmanship would reappear in history until the first mechanical astronomical clocks were built in Europe, some 1,500 years later... In the past decade, 3D scanning technology has helped reveal the inner workings of the device—including a set of interlocking gears—and an intricate set of inscriptions on the mechanism. Now, for the first time in the century since the Antikythera Mechanism was pulled from the sea, an international team of researchers has translated a significant portion of the text inscribed on the device... ‘So these very small texts are a very big thing for us.’ Big enough to determine that the mechanism was, Jones says, something of a ‘philosopher’s instructional device,’ and the text itself was a guide to reading it.”

"The Most Mysterious Object in the History of Technology" - http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/antikythera-mechanism-whoa/487832/ 

“Getting a humanities Ph.D. is the most deterministic path you can find to becoming exceptional in the industry. It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industrywide shift toward more ‘product thinking’ in leadership—leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed.”

Damon Horowitz, "From Technologist to Philosopher" - http://chronicle.com/article/From-Technologist-to/128231/. See also his Ted talk "Why We Need a Moral Operating System," and Tristan Harris's more recent talk, "How Better Tech Could Protect Us from Distraction." Stanford's Biblio Tech and more longstanding Humanities Lab are two academic programs that seem to be doing this well.

“The knock that liberal-arts graduates can have a tough time landing a first job is borne out by the data. Yet a new analysis of help-wanted postings for entry-level jobs suggests that those graduates can improve their job prospects markedly by acquiring a small level of proficiency in one of eight specific skill sets, such as social media or data analysis. In most cases, those skills increase salary prospects markedly, as well...Jobs for graduates with computer-programming skills paid nearly $18,000 more, and there were nearly 53,000 more of them.”

"Liberal-Arts Majors Have Plenty of Job Prospects If They Have Some Specific Skills Too" -http://chronicle.com/article/Liberal-Arts-Majors-Have/236749

“Rousseau transformed our understanding of many aspects of life. Three or four year ago the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur produced a special edition on Rousseau and on the front cover it made the following claims for Rousseau: he invented the child, nature, equality, democracy, and the cult of the self. Those are big claims for Rousseau, but they’re not entirely crazy. He made a difference to how we think about all of those things: about our own subjectivity, about politics, about equality. For the range of contribution and impact on Western intellectual culture, Rousseau is a big figure. He’s still a big figure, more than 300 years after his birth.”

"Chris Bertram Recommends the Best Books on Rousseau," -  http://fivebooks.com/interview/christopher-bertram-jean-jacques-rousseau/

“But there is a check on all of this anxiety about information collection and Borgesian libraries. The threat that human knowledge will be lost—either through destruction, or by dilution due to sheer scale—is still the dominant cultural narrative about libraries, real and imagined. The Library of Alexandria, often described as a physical embodiment of the heart and mind of the ancient world, is so famous today in part because it was destroyed. In The Book of Sand, Borges describes an infinite book that nearly drives the narrator mad before he resolves to get rid of it. ‘I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might likewise prove infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke,’ he writes. Instead, he opts to ‘hide a leaf in the forest’ and sets off for the Argentine National Library with the bizarre volume.”

"The Human Fear of total Knowledge" - http://theatln.tc/1UnzLfu

“-Hollywood Fixer: “Now Hail Caesar! is a prestige picture, our biggest release of the year and we’re devoting huge resources to its production in order to make it first-class in every respect. Gentlemen, given its enormous expense, we don’t want to send it to market except in the certainty that it will not offend any reasonable American regardless of faith or creed. Now that’s where you come in. You’ve read the script. We want to know if the theological elements of the story are up to snuff.... I’m not sure I follow, Padre.
-Rabbi: Young man, you don’t follow for a very simple reason. These men are screwballs. God has children? What, and a dog? A collie maybe? God doesn’t have children. He’s a bachelor. And very angry.
-Catholic Clergyman: No, no. He used to be angry!
-Rabbi: What, he got over it?
-Protestant Clergyman: You worship the God of another age!
-Catholic Clergyman: Who has no love!
-Rabbi: Not true! He likes Jews.
-Protestant Clergyman: God loves everyone!
-Catholic Clergyman: God is love.
-Orthodox Clergyman: God is who is.
-Rabbi: This is special? Who isn’t who is?
-Catholic Clergyman: But how should God be rendered in a motion picture?
-Rabbi: God isn’t in the motion picture!”

— Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, "Hail Caesar!" 2016.

Throughout the film the Coen's deftly juxtapose Hollywood's economic ideologies with the religious concern for idolatry. This scene provides a brief joke on religious aesthetics and metaphysics.

“Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side... Philosophers and theologians are used to talking about free will as if it is either on or off; as if our consciousness floats, like a ghost, entirely above the causal chain, or as if we roll through life like a rock down a hill. But there might be another way of looking at human agency. Some scholars argue that we should think about freedom of choice in terms of our very real and sophisticated abilities to map out multiple potential responses to a particular situation. One of these is Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University. In his new book, Restorative Free Will, he writes that we should focus on our ability, in any given setting, to generate a wide range of options for ourselves, and to decide among them without external constraint.”

Stephen Cave, "There's No Such Thing as Free Will: But We're Better of Believing In It Anyway" - http://theatln.tc/1soYWYZ

“In the quest for a workable ideal of democracy, the systems approach has recently shifted its perspective on deliberative democratic theory. Instead of enquiring how institutionalized decision-making might mirror an ‘ideal deliberative procedure’, it asks how democracy might be construed as a ‘deliberative system’... This article argues that a deliberative system without a parliamentary legislature is tantamount to deliberation without democracy and that an elected parliamentary legislature is constitutive of democracy as a deliberative system – national or transnational. To substantiate this claim, the article suggests looking at Habermas’ discourse theory in a new light, as a sociological-reconstructive approach that aims to explicate the cognitive dimension of modern democratic decision-making.”

Daniel Gaus, Discourse Theory’s Sociological Claim: Reconstructing the Epistemic Meaning of Democracy as a Deliberative System," Philosophy and Social Criticism - http://m.psc.sagepub.com/content/42/6/503.abstract?rss=1. Interesting article on deliberative democratic practices, especially in light of the rise of decisionistic politics today.

“And with this, we could analyze the history of introspection in the ancient Greek tradition, for which we have the best available written record. So what we did is we took all the books — we just ordered them by time — for each book we take the words and we project them to the space, and then we ask for each word how close it is to introspection, and we just average that. And then we ask whether, as time goes on and on, these books get closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. And this is exactly what happens in the ancient Greek tradition. So you can see that for the oldest books in the Homeric tradition, there is a small increase with books getting closer to introspection. But about four centuries before Christ, this starts ramping up very rapidly to an almost five-fold increase of books getting closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. And one of the nice things about this is that now we can ask whether this is also true in a different, independent tradition.”

Mariano Sigman, "Your Words May Predict Your Future Mental Health," Ted Talks - http://bit.ly/1OVoyXv. This is an interesting application of digital techniques to ancient texts, and with startling implications for contemporary life.