In April 2026 we held an internal Springer Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Festival. Across a series of keynote presentations, town halls, panel discussions, lightning talks, quizzes, and social events, we celebrated our rich HSS research output in book and journal article form, and our heritage, highlighting the impact and value of what we publish.  This series of short videos, with accompanying blog posts, are developed from a group of initial lightning talks that were delivered by Springer Nature colleagues during the festival. They build on individual experience to tell compelling stories about what we publish and why we value our work with academic communities in the varied disciplines that comprise the Humanities and the Social Sciences.  

My talk is a very short story about the enduring value and usefulness of humanistic knowledge: even though the world around us changes at an increasingly rapid pace, people more or less stay the same across the centuries. Using the example of an ah-ha moment I had when dealing with some trolls in the early days of Twitter, I show how 3000-year-old philosophy texts helped me understand what was then cutting-edge digital media...or rather, how people (mis)behave while using that media.