anthropology

Anthropology professor Biao Xiang has become an unexpected favourite among young people in China, who praise him for articulating the anxiety and pressures they face over work, education and an uncertain future. BBC coverage highlights how his commentary resonates with a generation feeling squeezed by intense competition, with many fans saying he understands their struggles better than most public figures.

A decades-long design problem is drawing attention: how to warn people thousands of years from now about buried nuclear waste, when languages and civilizations may have vanished. Proposed solutions range from hostile architecture and eerie earthworks to atomic 'ray cats' bred to change color near radiation, with semioticians and physicists still debating whether any message can truly outlast time.

Anthropologist Will Robertson has commented on Joseph Henrich's subreport, part of the Vanderbilt Report on the 'State of Scholarship' in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Henrich, of Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, authored the anthropology section. Robertson's remarks suggest scholars see ample material to engage with and debate in the report's assessment of the field.