Dowsing, homeopathy, Tarot cards and their relevance to mental health professions, and, of course, alien abductions.… Read the rest

‘The anti-intellectuals are finally on the side of power at its most unforgiving and voracious.’… Read the rest

‘There is nothing sacrosanct about any culture or religion’s rituals. Cultures are neither monolithic, unchanging, nor without internal critique and resistance…’… Read the rest

Prose as a window-pane opens onto a reality that is solidly and visibly ‘out there.’… Read the rest

‘the claims of psychoanalytic theory are not interpretations but determinate propositions about how the mind regularly works’… Read the rest

Azam Kamguian on what the anti-secularist backlash has done to education.… Read the rest

Education has been portrayed as ‘white’ – what use is it when strutting the streets?… Read the rest

Helena Echlin on the misery of being a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Yale. She has to stifle her urge to write ‘eh?’ in the margins, discovers that obfuscation is de rigeur, and that people who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages.… Read the rest

Do scientists ‘keep the faith’ and if so is that a good thing? Is religion a good source of morality?… Read the rest

What life was really like in Saddam’s Iraq and what it’s like now.… Read the rest

When students are consumers, they want what they pay for.… Read the rest

‘There has been a tendency among Marxist, or marxisant, critics of Darwin, and social Darwinism, to criticise, or ridicule, the theory as a simple product of the society in which it was developed.’… Read the rest

‘psychoanalysis, unlike a scientific theory but very much like certain religious or political movements, has essentially been immune from attacks leveled at it either from inside or outside the movement.’… Read the rest

‘What could be more foolish than to base one’s entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at that time, now appear to be quite erroneous?’… Read the rest

‘How, given the recent and sorry history of ideologically motivated conceptions of knowledge — Lysenkoism in Stalin’s Soviet Union, for example, or Nazi critiques of `Jewish science’ — could it again have become acceptable to behave in this way?’… Read the rest

What is a government department doing endorsing the idea that traditions and myths count as evidence?… Read the rest

Book reviews in glossy magazines, worshipful interviewers on public radio and tv, ‘annoying’ as the ultimate condemnation…… Read the rest

Terrorists, freedom fighters, fundamentalists, postcolonialism, the Enlightenment – all contested, as usual. … Read the rest

‘Sexual selection really is a good candidate for explaining a great deal about the unique evolution of our species.’… Read the rest

‘the findings were nicely congruent with the hypothesis’ – yes, they always are, that’s the problem.… Read the rest