🍎your Scholarly Digest 15th May, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Online Thumbnail: Monocle and Eye (blue), from Jocular Ocular series (N221) issued by Kinney Bros. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick.

Hi Scholar,

Lately, we’ve been thinking and talking a lot about what kind of publication The Scholarly Letter is, and what we want it to become.

If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ve probably noticed that we maintain a fairly critical stance on the ‘accelerationist’ logics (you know, the desire for ‘faster’, ‘more’) of broader society and, more specifically, of the knowledge economy. Our work is grounded in a desire to rethink how we relate to knowledge, and how we participate in the activities of making knowledge.

This kind of work takes time. Each Letter is a slow craft: one that requires us to read widely, think carefully, and write with intention. To give ourselves the space to do that well, we’ve decided to reduce our publishing rhythm: instead of sending 4 Digests and 2 Essays a month, we’ll now be sending 2 Digests and 2 Essays: 4 Letters total each month. We’ll still send them out on Thursdays, alternating between Digest and Essay each week.

We care deeply about the labour that goes into each Letter. We hope this new cadence gives us the space to produce our best work and equally importantly, gives you the time to sit with it more slowly, to reflect, and to think alongside us.

One more thing: some of you have asked if there’s a place to find and share past Letters. There is: The Scholarly Letter Archive. We’ve even started curating thumbnails for each Letter. It’s a small thing, but we think it adds a certain…. je ne sais quoi to the project: a little visual character to go with the voice.

BRAIN FOOD

Cite Me, Like Me, Follow Me

We like to think that the work of an academic researcher is a private job: something done behind closed doors, away from the noise (and nose) of public life. But this vision is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. As the knowledge economy has become intertwined with the attention economy, the image of the private academic has begun to retreat. 

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