Many professors in the humanities keep calling it a packaging problem. Wrong. The real reasons enrollment is collapsing: obsession with identity, speech policing as virtue, and the conversion of entire disciplines into political projects.

"I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people." - David Graeber

Now I know times are really tough…

The ugly truth is that there was probably nothing humanists could have done to keep the ship afloat post-2008: austerity measures + the slowing of the university’s Social Mobility Engine + increasingly preposterous tuition + Bad Deans made studying the humanities a tough sell.

One needn’t go into all the ways in which the humanities have abolished their own prestige in a bid for activist urgency; the “transferable skills” paradigm is successfully suicidal all on its own.

The Deep Vellum NYC Crew will be tabling at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday 9/27! Come visit us at Booth 312 and you might even run into some special guests…

Israel admits mistakes over medic killings in Gaza bbc.in/3XLEvqq

Wow: Of 11-12,000 undergraduate degrees at UT, only 300 were in any humanities program. That includes History and English: thedailytexan.com/2026/09/22…

JUST IN: An OpenAI AI agent went rogue and hacked the Australian government. At a press conference earlier today, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed the AI broke into Australia's Medicare statistics portal and accessed non-public data. The attack occured in June, but OpenAI did not notify the Australian government until September, nearly three months later, and initially only sent an email "to just the public mailbox". The Prime Minister was only informed this weekend. His description of the attack: "On June 18, OpenAI's research team used an internal model to conduct internet-based research into public medicine spending. So that's how this began." "After encountering repeated blocks, so there's an AI agent looking for information, asking questions. There were blocks clearly which were coming back telling the AI agent, no. The AI agent found a way around those blocks. Didn't accept no for an answer, if you like." "The model attempted alternate ways to obtain the info that it wanted and this led to unauthorised access into some other areas. It accessed public and non-public information within the portal and Services Australia also advises that in order to do this, it engaged in writing files as well to the internal server." Albanese has spoken to CEO Sam Altman to express "Australia's extreme concern" about the attack and disappointment about how long it took the company to come forward. The Prime Minister says he was shocked to learn of the attack, but also that it was something that had been predicted, even by the AI companies themselves, who have said "one of the risks that we need to deal with here is that artificial intelligence can go its own way." "Put simply, humans must remain in control." Some highlights from the press conference, which went for around 30 minutes: