Look, I made Gawker!

I’m not kidding. Really. I made it onto the site.

No, I’m not all of a sudden a celebrity, nor did I do something distasteful enough to be noticed (much to the relief of my family).

Instead, it is the fault of Neil deGrasse Tyson, or rather, it is the fault of my recent piece on how Tyson should be an example for humanist engagement with the public.  Here’s a quick sample of the piece:

We need to puncture the silly public misperceptions of professors as characters straight out of Dead Poets Society (get off your desks now). Yes, I know we are engaged, but apparently the public doesn’t. So we’d better proclaim more loudly and clearly what our work actually entails—including research and teaching, its value and relevance to society, and the conditions we labor under.

Frankly, I think we should all take a page from science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson, the well-regarded astrophysicist who directs the Hayden Planetarium, writes popular science books, regularly appears on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and is the new host of an updated version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on television. Tyson is a rock star. He can explain the complexities of science, and he can banter back and forth with Jon Stewart.

Listening to him describe the cosmos makes me yearn to be a scientist. (Sorry, Neil, I’m a humanist.) He’s a key advocate of the centrality of science to both a well-rounded education and a more informed public. Imagine if more humanities scholars emulated his example and explained our studies’ relevance without sacrificing analysis and complexity.

Gawker writer Adam Weinstein kindly included a synopsis of my article in his fabulous “Where Is the Humanities Neil deGrasse Tyson?”* He argues compelling that the humanities need folks like Tyson to bring public interest to our discipline. Obviously, I couldn’t agree more.  Adam writes:

Imagine if a philosopher or historian or literature professor could show mass-TV audiences the inner workings of things that are not science—from the assumptions of economics to the greatness of the great books to the sociocultural complications of canon-building to the cultural coding of Duck Dynasty. Imagine if they factchecked movies like Spiderman and Gravity for ethical and intellectual lapses with the geeky gusto that Tyson displays in factchecking the films’ scientific content. Imagine if we live-tweeted these professors’ lively, decidedly untraditional lectures and Q&As and documentaries the way we did with Tyson’s.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the article, there’s an addendum about my piece, which is pretty darn cool.

*A hearty thank you to Liana Silva Ford for pointing out Adam’s article and to Vim, PhD for putting us in conversation. This is why Twitter is my favorite form of social media.

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