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. The implicit lesson is that grown-ups aren’t infallible. It’s OK to laugh at them and it’s OK to feel compassion for them and it’s even OK to feel sorry for them on occasion.

The adult figures in children’s literature are also frequently outsiders or eccentrics in some way, and quite often subject to ridicule

yes, adults are often the Other — which makes them a mystery and a curiosity. Literature offers insight into these occasionally intimidating creatures.

In real life, children revere adults and they fear them. It only follows, then, that they appreciate when adult characters behave admirably but also delight in seeing the consequences — especially when rendered with humor — when they don’t.

Nursery rhymes, folk tales, myths and legends overwhelmingly cast adults as their central characters — and have endured for good reason

In somewhat later tales, children investigated crimes alongside Sherlock Holmes, adventured through Narnia, inhabited Oz and traversed Middle-earth. Grown-up heroes can be hobbits, or rabbits (“Watership Down”), badgers or moles (“The Wind in the Willows”). Children join them no matter what because they like to be in league with their protagonists and by extension, their authors.

In children’s books with adult heroes, children get to conspire alongside their elders. Defying the too-often adversarial relationship between adults and children in literature, such books enable children to see that adults are perfectly capable of occupying their shared world with less antagonism — as partners in life, in love and in adventure.

Before the introduction of Botox and hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in 2002 and 2003, respectively, aesthetic work was serious, expensive. Nose jobs and face lifts required general anesthesia, not insignificant recovery time, and cost thousands of dollars (in 2000, a facelift was $5,416 on average, and a rhinoplasty $4,109, around $9,400 and $7,000 adjusted).

In contrast, the average price of a syringe of hyaluronic acid filler today is $684, while treating, for example, the forehead and eyes with Botox will put you out anywhere from $300 to $600

Botox and filler only accelerated a trend that began in the ’70s and ’80s and is just now reaching its saturation point.

In 2018, use of Botox and fillers was up 18% and 20% from five years prior. Philosophies of prejuvenation have made Botox use jump 22% among 22- to 37-year-olds in half a decade as well. By 2030, global noninvasive aesthetic treatments are predicted to triple.

The trouble is that a status symbol, without status, is common.

Beauty has always been exclusive. When someone strikes you as pretty, it means they are something that everyone else is not.

It’s a zero-sum game, as relative as our morals. Naturally, we hoard of beauty what we can. It’s why we call grooming tips “secrets.”

Largely the secrets started with the wealthy, who possess the requisite money and leisure to spare on their appearances

We copied the beautiful and the rich, not in facsimile, but in homage.

we didn’t have the tools for anything more than emulation. Fake breasts and overdrawn lips only approximated real ones; a birthmark drawn with pencil would always be just that.

Instagram Face, on the other hand, distinguishes itself by its sheer reproducibility. Not only because of those new cosmetic technologies, which can truly reshape features, at reasonable cost and with little risk.

built in to the whole premise of reversible, low-stakes modification is an indefinite flux, and thus a lack of discretion.

Instagram Face has replicated outward, with trendsetters giving up competing with one another in favor of looking eerily alike. And obviously it has replicated down.

But the more rapidly it replicates, and the clearer our manuals for quick imitation become, the closer we get to singularity—that moment Kim Kardashian fears unlike any other: the moment when it becomes unclear whether we’re copying her, or whether she is copying us.

natural looks have always been, and still are, more valuable than artificial ones. Partly because of our urge to legitimize in any way we can the advantages we have over other people. Hotness is a class struggle.

As more and more women post videos of themselves eating, sleeping, dressing, dancing, and Only-Fanning online, in a logical bid for economic ascendance, the women who haven’t needed to do that gain a new status symbol.

Privacy. A life which is not a ticketed show. An intimacy that does not admit advertisers. A face that does not broadcast its insecurity, or the work undergone to correct it.

Upper class, private women get discrete work done. The differences aren’t in the procedures themselves—they’re the same—but in disposition

Eva, who lives between central London, Geneva, and the south of France, says: “I do stuff, but none of the stuff I do is at all in my head associated with Instagram Face. Essentially you do similar procedures, but the end goal is completely different. Because they are trying to get the result of looking like another human being, and I’m just beautifying myself.”

Eva looks like Eva. If she has procedures in common with Kim K, you couldn’t tell. “I look at my features and I think long and hard of how I can, without looking different and while keeping as natural as possible, make them look better and more proportional. I’m against everything that is too invasive. My problem with Instagram Face is that if you want to look like someone else, you should be in therapy.”

what he restores is complicated and yet not complicated at all. It’s herself, the fingerprint of her features. Her aura, her presence and genealogy, her authenticity in space and time.

Dr. Taktouk’s approach is “not so formulaic.” He aims to give his patients the “better versions of themselves.” “It’s not about trying to be anyone else,” he says, “or creating a conveyor belt of patients. It’s about working with your best features, enhancing them, but still looking like you.”

“Vulgar” says that in pursuing indistinguishability, women have been duped into another punishing divide. “Vulgar” says that the subtlety of his work is what signals its special class—and that the women who’ve obtained Instagram Face for mobility’s sake have unwittingly shut themselves out of it.

While younger women are dissolving their gratuitous work, the 64-year-old Madonna appeared at the Grammy Awards in early February, looking so tragically unlike herself that the internet launched an immediate postmortem.

The folly of Instagram Face is that in pursuing a bionic ideal, it turns cosmetic technology away from not just the reality of class and power, but also the great, poignant, painful human project of trying to reverse time. It misses the point of what we find beautiful: that which is ephemeral, and can’t be reproduced

Age is just one of the hierarchies Instagram Face can’t topple, in the history of women striving versus the women already arrived. What exactly have they arrived at?

Youth, temporarily. Wealth. Emotional security. Privacy. Personal choices, like cosmetic decisions, which are not so public, and do not have to be defended as empowered, in the defeatist humiliation of our times

Maybe they’ve arrived at love, which for women has never been separate from the things I’ve already mentioned.

I can’t help but recall the time I was chatting with a plastic surgeon. I began to point to my features, my flaws. I asked her, “What would you do to me, if I were your patient?” I had many ideas. She gazed at me, and then noticed my ring. “Nothing,” she said. “You’re already married.”

One calculation performed by an audience demographics firm found 32 million connections to male followers among the 5,000 accounts examined by The Times.

Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.

“It’s like a candy store

The troubling interactions on Instagram come as social media companies increasingly dominate the cultural landscape and the internet is seen as a career path of its own.

Nearly one in three preteens lists influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers.

The so-called creator economy surpasses $250 billion worldwide, according to Goldman Sachs, with U.S. brands spending more than $5 billion a year on influencers.

Health and technology experts have recently cautioned that social media presents a “profound risk of harm” for girls. Constant comparisons to their peers and face-altering filters are driving negative feelings of self-worth and promoting objectification of their bodies, researchers found.

he pursuit of online fame, particularly through Instagram, has supercharged the often toxic phenomenon, The Times found, encouraging parents to commodify their children’s images. Some of the child influencers earn six-figure incomes, according to interviews.

The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.

AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”

AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.

Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.

n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.

One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.

erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.

“There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).

A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.

Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”

One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)

Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”

Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”

AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.

Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits

With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.

Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”

His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”

Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.

Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.

Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”

Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”

A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.

Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.

Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.

ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load

We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”

Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.

But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.

n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.

Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.

ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”

The human problem-solvers — 609 high school students from 108 countries — won 58 gold medals, 123 silver and 145 bronze. The A.I. performed at the level of a silver medalist, solving four out of six problems for a total of 28 points. It was the first time that A.I. has achieved a medal-worthy performance on an Olympiad’s problems.

Nonetheless, Dr. Kohli described the result as a “phase transition” — a transformative change — “in the use of A.I. in mathematics and the ability of A.I. systems to do mathematics.”

Dr. Gowers added in an email: “I was definitely impressed.” The lab had discussed its Olympiad ambitions with him a couple of weeks beforehand, so “my expectations were quite high,” he said. “But the program met them, and in one or two instances significantly surpassed them.” The program found the “magic keys” that unlocked the problems, he said.

Haojia Shi, a student from China, ranked No. 1 and was the only competitor to earn a perfect score — 42 points for six problems; each problem is worth seven points for a full solution. The U.S. team won first place with 192 points; China placed second with 190.

The Google system earned its 28 points for fully solving four problems — two in algebra, one in geometry and one in number theory. (It flopped at two combinatorics problems.) The system was allowed unlimited time; for some problems it took up to three days. The students were allotted only 4.5 hours per exam.

“The fact that we’ve reached this threshold, where it’s even possible to tackle these problems at all, is what represents a step-change in the history of mathematics,” he added. “And hopefully it’s not just a step-change in the I.M.O., but also represents the point at which we went from computers only being able to prove very, very simple things toward computers being able to prove things that humans can’t.”

“Mathematics requires this interesting combination of abstract, precise and creative reasoning,” Dr. Davies said. In part, he noted, this repertoire of abilities is what makes math a good litmus test for the ultimate goal: reaching so-called artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a system with capabilities ranging from emerging to competent to virtuoso to superhuman

In January, a Google DeepMind system named AlphaGeometry solved a sampling of Olympiad geometry problems at nearly the level of a human gold medalist. “AlphaGeometry 2 has now surpassed the gold medalists in solving I.M.O. problems,” Thang Luong, the principal investigator, said in an email.

Dr. Hubert’s team developed a new model that is comparable but more generalized. Named AlphaProof, it is designed to engage with a broad range of mathematical subjects. All told, AlphaGeometry and AlphaProof made use of a number of different A.I. technologies.

One approach was an informal reasoning system, expressed in natural language. This system leveraged Gemini, Google’s large language model. It used the English corpus of published problems and proofs and the like as training data.

The informal system excels at identifying patterns and suggesting what comes next; it is creative and talks about ideas in an understandable way. Of course, large language models are inclined to make things up — which may (or may not) fly for poetry and definitely not for math. But in this context, the L.L.M. seems to have displayed restraint; it wasn’t immune to hallucination, but the frequency was reduced.

Another approach was a formal reasoning system, based on logic and expressed in code. It used theorem prover and proof-assistant software called Lean, which guarantees that if the system says a proof is correct, then it is indeed correct. “We can exactly check that the proof is correct or not,” Dr. Hubert said. “Every step is guaranteed to be logically sound.”

Another crucial component was a reinforcement learning algorithm in the AlphaGo and AlphaZero lineage. This type of A.I. learns by itself and can scale indefinitely, said Dr. Silver, who is Google DeepMind’s vice-president of reinforcement learning. Since the algorithm doesn’t require a human teacher, it can “learn and keep learning and keep learning until ultimately it can solve the hardest problems that humans can solve,” he said. “And then maybe even one day go beyond those.”

Dr. Hubert added, “The system can rediscover knowledge for itself.” That’s what happened with AlphaZero: It started with zero knowledge, Dr. Hubert said, “and by just playing games, and seeing who wins and who loses, it could rediscover all the knowledge of chess. It took us less than a day to rediscover all the knowledge of chess, and about a week to rediscover all the knowledge of Go. So we thought, Let’s apply this to mathematics.”

Dr. Gowers doesn’t worry — too much — about the long-term consequences. “It is possible to imagine a state of affairs where mathematicians are basically left with nothing to do,” he said. “That would be the case if computers became better, and far faster, at everything that mathematicians currently do.”

“There still seems to be quite a long way to go before computers will be able to do research-level mathematics,” he added. “It’s a fairly safe bet that if Google DeepMind can solve at least some hard I.M.O. problems, then a useful research tool can’t be all that far away.”

A really adept tool might make mathematics accessible to more people, speed up the research process, nudge mathematicians outside the box. Eventually it might even pose novel ideas that resonate.

These come, as far as I can tell, in two broad types, corresponding to the two fundamental complaints that people voice about their undergraduate experience

The first complaint is that college did not prepare them for the real world: that the whole exercise—papers, busywork, pointless requirements; siloed disciplines and abstract theory—seemed remote from anything that they actually might want to do with their lives. 

Above all, they are student-centered. Participants are enabled (and expected) to direct their education by constructing bespoke curricula out of the resources the program gives them access to. In a word, these endeavors emphasize “engagement.”

A student will identify a problem (a human need, an injustice, an instance of underrepresentation), then devise and implement a response (a physical system, a community-facing program, an art project). 

Professors were often preoccupied, with little patience for mentorship, the open-ended office-hours exploration. Classes, even in fields like philosophy, felt lifeless, impersonal, like engineering but with words instead of numbers. Worst of all were their fellow undergraduates, those climbers and careerists. “It’s hard to build your soul,” as one of my students once put it to me, “when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”

Not everything in the world is a problem, and to see the world as a series of problems is to limit the potential of both world and self. What problem does a song address? What problem will reading Voltaire help you solve, in any predictable way? The “problem” approach—the “engagement” approach, the save-the-world approach—leaves out, finally, what I’d call learning.

that is the second complaint that graduates tend to express: that they finished college without the feeling that they had learned anything, in this essential sense.

That there is a treasure out there—call it the Great Books or just great books, the wisdom of the ages or the best that has been thought and said—that its purpose is to activate the treasure inside them, that they had come to one of these splendid institutions (whose architecture speaks of culture, whose age gives earnest of depth) to be initiated into it, but that they had been denied, deprived. For unclear reasons, cheated.

I had students like this at Columbia and Yale. There were never a lot of them, and to judge from what’s been happening to humanities enrollments, there are fewer and fewer. (From 2013 to 2022, the number of people graduating with bachelors degrees in English fell by 36%. As a share of all degrees, it fell by 42%, to less than 1 in 60.)

They would tell me—these pilgrims, these intellectuals in embryo, these kindled souls—how hard they were finding it to get the kind of education they had come to college for.

what bothers me about this educational approach—the “problem” approach, the “STEAM” (STEM + arts) approach—is what it leaves out. It leaves out the humanities. It leaves out books. It leaves out literature and philosophy, history and art history and the history of religion. It leaves out any mode of inquiry—reflection, speculation, conversation with the past—that cannot be turned to immediate practical ends

The Catherine Project sees itself as being in the business of creating “communities of learning”; its principles include “conversation and hospitality, “simplicity [and] transparency.” Classes (called tutorials, in keeping with the practice at St. John’s) are free (BISR’s cost $335), are capped at four to six students (at BISR, the limit is 23), run for two hours a week for twelve weeks, and skew towards the canon: the Greeks and Romans, Pascal and Kierkegaard, Dante and Cervantes (the project also hosts a large number of reading groups, which address a wider range of texts). If BISR aspires to create a fairer market for academic labor—instructors keep the lion’s share of fees—the Catherine Project functions as a gift economy (though plans are to begin to offer tutors modest honoraria).

As Russell Jacoby has noted, the migration of intellectuals into universities in the decades after World War II, which he documented in The Last Intellectuals, has more recently reversed itself. The rise, or re-rise, of little magazines (Dissent, Commentary, Partisan Review then; n+1, The New Inquiry, The Point, The Drift, et al. now) is part of the same story. 

a fourth factor. If there are students who despair at the condition of the humanities on campus, there are professors who do so as well. Many of her teachers, Hitz told me, have regular ladder appointments: “We draw academics—who attend our groups as well as leading them—because the life of the mind is dying or dead in conventional institutions.” Undergraduate teaching, she added, “is a particularly hard pull,” and the Catherine Project offers faculty the chance to teach people “who actually want to learn.

I’d add, who can. Nine years ago, Stephen Greenblatt wrote: “Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley. … The problem is that their engagement with language … often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.” By now, of course, the picture is far worse.

The response to the announcement of our pilot programs confirmed for me the existence of a large, unmet desire for text-based exploration, touching on the deepest questions, outside the confines of higher education

Applicants ranged from graduating college seniors to people in their 70s. They included teachers, artists, scientists, and doctoral students from across the disciplines; a submarine officer, a rabbinical student, an accountant, and a venture capitalist; retirees, parents of small children, and twentysomethings at the crossroads. Forms came in from India, Jordan, Brazil, and nine other foreign countries. The applicants were, as a group, tremendously impressive. If it had been possible, we would have taken many more than fifteen.

When asked why they wanted to participate, a number of them spoke about the pathologies of formal education. “We have a really damaged relationship to learning,” said one. “It should be fun, not scary”—as in, you feel that you’re supposed to know the answer, which as a student, as she noted, makes no sense

“We need opportunities for reading and exploration that lie outside the credentialing system of the modern university,” he went on, because there’s so much in the latter that cuts against “the slow way that kind of learning unfolds.”

“How one might choose to live.” For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight.

I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of “relevance,” the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity

The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.

That is why it’s crucial that the Matthew Strother Center has no goal—and this is true of the Catherine Project and other off-campus humanities programs, as well—beyond the pursuit of learning for its own sake.

This is freedom. When education isn’t pointed in particular directions, its possibilities are endless