Opinion | Can Culture Be Society’s Savior? - The New York Times

It pains me to witness the modern-day devaluation of the arts and humanities. When I was a child, my art history major mother dragged me to many of the world’s great museums: the National Gallery of Art, the Met, the Louvre. I may have protested after the first hour, but certain works left indelible impressions: the terrifying passion of Klimt’s “Kiss,” the seductive movement of the Calder mobile. Likewise, literature plunged me into different perspectives. The hard but loving existence of the Ingalls family in “Little House on the Prairie,” the dark history of internment of Japanese Americans in “Farewell to Manzanar,” the peculiar foibles of Shakespearean characters — entering these worlds deepened my understanding of life and fostered compassion, exactly as Mr. Brooks states. At a time when my alma mater, Stanford University, reports that all five of the top declared undergraduate majors were in STEM fields, with computer science by far the most popular, our society desperately need

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• Madhu Nathani