I’m sitting on an Amtrak on my way home from Providence, Rhode Island. The guy sitting next to me, who works in marketing for a New York law firm, is reading the Greek text of Xenophon’s Anabasis “for fun.”  I’m reading Flavius Josephus’s Jewish War, for leisure though not quite for fun. The woman to my right is reading Moby Dick; I hesitate to ask why, but she doesn’t look unhappy. Another woman just got on and sat next to us, reading Jenny Erpenbech’s Kairos. The two women are now having an animated literary conversation. It’s got to be one of the most literary rows on the train. 

No STEM warriors in sight. No AI or ChatGPT, either. The demise of the humanities has been greatly exaggerated, at least on Amtrak train #149.