🍎your Scholarly Digest 1st May, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Hi Scholar,

This is the 25th Letter we’ve sent in 2025. To mark this (mini)-feat, we thought we’d share why we decided to call this project The Scholarly Letter. Besides, we’ve explained elsewhere why we chose the word ‘scholarly’, so it only seems fitting to tell you why we chose ‘letter’.

It wasn’t random. A while ago, we came across the Republic of Letters - a virtual, global community of intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries who kept the lifeblood of ideas flowing through one key medium: the letter. Long before the internet, scholars, scientists, and philosophers debated, criticised, and shared their thinking by post. This metaphysical republic of ideas was built entirely on letters: lots of them.

That spirit animates The Scholarly Letter. What we send aren’t letters in the traditional sense: we know they’re emails. But the intention is the same: to explore the ideas, debates, and questions that matter to scholars. And maybe, we preserve a little of the slowness and intentionality of the post, in contrast to the evanescence of tweets and algorithmic scrolls.

We’re not quite Voltaire with his 15,000 letters but this is our 25th, and who knows? Maybe one day we’ll get there. Maybe one day we’ll even send out physical ones.

BRAIN FOOD

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