Stanford Humanities Center
Interventions
Welcome to Interventions, an experimental space where authors rehearse new ideas, reframe questions, or play unbridled within Arcade’s field of the humanities in the world. These short posts (most Interventions are in the 1,800-3,500 word range) embrace the incomplete, the imperfect, and the indeterminate, but they may become much more: for example, the record of a thinker’s turn toward a new paradigm or the rough draft of a chapter in a new book. Rapid publication and immediate responses permit Interventions to foster conversation. The tone of the posts may range from personal to political, while maintaining a critical edge.
Published regularly, Interventions are often freestanding contributions to Arcade, but some may join our feature called Colloquies. Inquiries and submissions are received by the Director of Arcade.
I am standing in Stanford University's Green Library with a large box of books at my feet. These are community cookbooks, rare in the sense that all are from small, local organizations and are part of short print runs. I have been here for about an hour in front of the Book Eye, a high-quality book...
As an undergraduate in the early nineties, I took a math course titled “Geometry and the Imagination.” Developed by John Conway, William Thurston, Jane Gilman, and Peter Doyle, it offered majors and non-majors alike an introduction to the creative and imaginative side of mathematics. One day, the...
Puchur Chaikhan (პუჭურ ჩაიხან) is imprisoned now in Georgia. Many poets and writers and actors and workers and truck drivers and delivery personnel and prime ministers and presidents are also in prison now. Puchur Chaikhan has been writing poems since he was a child. People petition to grant him...
AI threatens to undermine the unspoken norms of writing and communication that guide our daily lives. Here are some proposals to address that development.
At the January 2026 Modern Language Association (MLA) Awards Ceremony, MLA President Tina Lu presented Ramón Saldívar with the MLA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. A professor of English and comparative literature and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford...
