In today's issue:

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Ten scholars commissioned by the presidents of Vanderbilt and Washington University concluded that the humanities and humanistic social sciences show "a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria," naming anthropology among the most extreme cases. Carolyn Rouse, president of the American Anthropological Association, published a response calling the report factually wrong and produced without meaningful engagement with the field, and told the Chronicle of Higher Education that its authors leaned on AI.

The economist Radek Stefanski used LLMs to rate 23,000 Western canon texts from year 0 to 1920 on hierarchy, fear of the untried, competitive striving, patience, individualism, and indulgence. He treats the scores as slowly depreciating cultural stocks with a half-life of roughly 138 years, and reports that the resulting measure of resistance to new ideas fell 51 percent between 1000 and 1920, with the largest drops preceding print and the Reformation. In his calibrated growth model, holding culture at its year-1000 level puts 1920 productivity at 56 percent of its actual value, and he notes that the exercise does not settle causation.

In The One and the Ninety-Nine, Burgis argues that social contagion erodes individual identity and that groups enforce consensus by casting out scapegoats. He follows his 2021 book Wanting by mixing memoir with what he calls "probes," images and QR-coded prompts meant to test a reader's susceptibility to imitation. Cecilia Cicone's review notes that the framework draws on Catholic anthropology and the Rule of St. Benedict without presenting itself as a Catholic book.

Writing in Minding the Campus, Ryan argues that AI thrives in higher education because publication became a currency of career advancement rather than a record of discovery, favoring legible methods and norm-compliant writing. He is less concerned with students using ChatGPT than with professors producing papers indistinguishable from what they already write. The essay treats the problem as institutional, arguing that peer review has long mistaken fluency for thought and that AI simply removes the labor of manufacturing it.

Court records in Bartz v. Anthropic reportedly identify Datamation Imaging Services, an Illinois document-scanning firm, as the vendor Anthropic engaged for an internal effort called Project Panama. Pascal Hetzscholdt's review of the docket describes filed exhibits including a Datamation proposal and payment records, along with deposition testimony from Anthropic executive Tom Turvey.

The reported workflow is straightforward. Anthropic bought used print books, stripped the bindings, cut the pages, scanned them, and discarded the physical originals. Datamation is an ordinary regional scanning company with no verified work for other AI labs.

The legal picture is narrower than the workflow suggests. Judge William Alsup's June 2025 summary-judgment order treated each act of copying separately. It held that converting lawfully purchased print books into internal digital copies was fair use, describing those copies as a searchable, space-saving replacement with no redistribution. It also held that training the models on books was transformative on the record before the court. It denied fair-use protection for downloading and retaining pirated copies in a general-purpose central library. The $1.5 billion class settlement, approved by Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, covers works Anthropic downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi and requires destruction of those files. It does not require deletion of scans made from legally purchased print books.

Sources: Pascal Hetzscholdt, Order on Fair Use, Class Action Settlement Agreement, Associated Press.

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Denise Riley says the poet's voice comes from listening, not from the self. Her four essays in A Chorus of Ears treat voice as something built by reading and by what she calls "self-overhearing." Language passes through the writer rather than starting there. Riley also argues that a "poetry career" works against the freedom lyric writing requires.

Alex Sharpe reads David Bowie through six philosophers. We're Nobody's Children runs Bowie's personas past Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and Simone Weil. Richard Skinner finds the Weil chapter the surprise, reading Bowie's withdrawals as a form of mystical retreat.

David Carrier on Sartre's Venice essays and the logic of Venetian painting. The argument is that canals, bridges, and water travel produce a spatial logic unlike Florentine linear perspective. Giorgione's Tempest gets set against a landlocked contemporary to show the difference. Sartre: "When you look out of your window, you see the canals, which govern your travels."

Dutch historians reject new AI-assisted verdict on who betrayed Anne Frank. Rosemary Sullivan's The Betrayal of Anne Frank considers a controversial outstanding puzzle: Who told the Nazis that the Franks were in hiding? Sullivan claims they were betrayed by Arnold van den Bergh, a notary and member of the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council, who gave up other Jews in hiding in exchange for freedom. Several Holocaust historians in the Netherlands reject the finding.

David Nutt has edited the first publication of Newsreels, an early unpublished novel by Hob Broun, out August 25 from Calamari Archive. He first read Broun through a class taught by Garielle Lutz, then learned from Sam Lipsyte that Broun's partner Freda had sent Giancarlo DiTrapano a box containing unpublished stories, journals, letters, notes, and Newsreels. After DiTrapano's death in 2021, the archival box was retrieved in Naples.

The novel predates Broun's published fiction. Newsreels was rejected by roughly 28 publishers, one editor calling it vile. Calamari Archive describes the novel as set in a 1970s Hollywood of surveillance, television, fame, and paranoia.

Sources: Zona Motel interview with David Nutt, Calamari Archive on Newsreels, Hob Broun taped interview, 1985, David Nutt publications.