Nov 5, 2026 · 20 min
Harvard’s hardest humanities course draws students back to deep reading
Reading As an Act of Resistance (Notes on Harvard’s Hum 10)
The episode asks whether demanding books and independent thought can become a meaningful alternative to the shallow incentives of smartphones, social media, and generative AI.
- 1Harvard’s Hum 10 makes sustained reading central, challenging assumptions that college students no longer want demanding humanities work.
- 2Newport frames deep reading as an escape from the shortcuts and shallow rewards reinforced by social media, TikTok, and generative AI.
- 3The course’s appeal suggests students may be seeking difficult intellectual experiences precisely because digital culture makes them harder to sustain.
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Newport’s central reversal is that students’ attraction to Harvard’s demanding reading course may signal resistance to digital shallowness, not indifference to serious work.
The brief
Cal Newport opens with a question raised by Rose Horowitz’s Atlantic essay: have smartphones and AI weakened college students’ ability to read full books and write independently?
The episode turns to Harvard’s Hum 10, a demanding humanities course built around reading a substantial book each week, and its unexpected popularity among students.
Newport argues that the course’s appeal may reflect resistance rather than decline: students are drawn to difficult, meaningful work as an alternative to digital shortcuts.
The broader tension is whether social media, TikTok, and generative AI have made deep reading obsolete—or made it feel newly valuable as an escape from shallow rewards.
Hum 10’s popularity becomes evidence that concern about collegiate literacy should not obscure a competing possibility: students still want demanding intellectual experiences.
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