It’s important to distinguish between necessary, useful technicality, and jargon or pseudo-mathematics substituting for genuine rigor.… Read the rest
All entries by this author
Professionalization in the Humanities
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWhat if you want to talk about an authentic self instead of an ‘authentic self’?… Read the rest
McCarthyism’s Indian Rebirth
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe new chauvinism receives official sanction from government and academic institutions.… Read the rest
Frank Furedi on Paranoid Parents
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe world is a jungle, barely one child in a hundred escapes being murdered! Or so you would think.… Read the rest
So Sylvia Plath was a Poet?
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘Death and marriage may have fed and fuelled her writing, but – posthumously at least – they cramp her style.’… Read the rest
Hitchens on Contrarianism
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘Among his many weapons are a forensic curiosity, a vast learning, a savage wit, a commanding intellect, an international perspective and a moral authority that is built on something sturdier than cheap moralising.’… Read the rest
A Moral Argument for Atheism
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonSlaughter of innocents, human sacrifice, eternal torture – it’s all there.… Read the rest
Durkheim on Religion
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe way to ‘reject the insipid relativism of the tabula rasa without denying or ignoring the freedom and variability of individual human beings and their cultures.’… Read the rest
Memory and trauma
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonSally Satel looks at the way we construct narratives about our symptoms.… Read the rest
Curtis White on The Middle Mind
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBook reviews in glossy magazines, worshipful interviewers on public radio and tv, ‘annoying’ as the ultimate condemnation…… Read the rest
The Baghdad blogger.
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWhat life was really like in Saddam’s Iraq and what it’s like now.… Read the rest
Livid Quietism on the Right
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘The anti-intellectuals are finally on the side of power at its most unforgiving and voracious.’… Read the rest
‘Without a theory, you can’t meet the people.’
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonMiller wonders why ‘unavailing Latinate neologisms’ convince so many people that something profound is being said.… Read the rest
Or Academic Pooh and Postmodern Instincts
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonLiterary criticism, cultural studies; love letter and satire.… Read the rest
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonConsider Will Crooks, Labour MP. ‘Growing up in extreme poverty…Crooks spent 2d. on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled…’… Read the rest
Carol Tavris Wonders Where the Evidence Is
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘But the gender-genre books that are based largely on clinical intuition and popular psychology typically lack a basic skepticism toward received wisdom and the willingness to wrestle with an idea to see who wins.’… Read the rest
Research psychology or psychotherapy.
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘…many of the widely accepted claims promulgated by therapists are based on subjective clinical opinions and have been resoundingly disproved by empirical research conducted by psychological scientists.’… Read the rest
Dwight Macdonald
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘…all but a fraction of his own writing molders unattended in America’s used bookstores. Like the New York Intellectuals with whom he was associated…he is referenced more often than read, a sad fate for a critic who wrote so much, so well and with such wit and insight.’… Read the rest
The Great Convergence
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBeware of neo-Deistic pseudoreligion.… Read the rest
The margins are getting so crowded!
Apr 10th, 2010 | Filed by Ophelia BensonCentrality is so uncool that the margins are as full of people as Bangkok or the Aran Islands.… Read the rest