A Substack that pairs a midweek scrapbook of poems, paintings, passages and etymologies with weekend essays on influential thinkers from the history of ideas. Readers get accessible, curated introductions to figures like Simone Weil, Ursula Le Guin, Habermas and Walter Benjamin.
Website: https://thehumanitieslibrary.substack.com
Alethic is a Japanese-language newsletter that uses history and social science to explain puzzles such as why mortality fell during the Industrial Revolution, why Vikings went raiding, and what the Dutch land reclamations cost. Each issue combines a clear thesis with cited sources and specific data, so readers get explanations they would not find in a typical news digest.
A Harvard PhD candidate and humanist writes about AI's effects on work, education, culture and society, blending research with personal perspective. Readers get grounded analysis of topics like universities versus AI-era academies and the cultural implications of generative AI.
Office Hours is a cross-disciplinary essay newsletter that uses mutual learning between academic fields to probe questions about meaning, society, and expertise. Its issues mix reflective critique of peer review and academic gatekeeping with essayistic reflections on internalised knowledge and de-siloing.
The UP18 newsletter, from a Paris popular university, publishes essays and lecture write-ups on humanities and social issues. Recent issues cover French left-wing politics after a June 2026 speech and a series of interviews on climate and ecological knowledge.
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