No it’s not just an accident that the character who gets Tom Hanks killed in Saving Private Ryan is both an intellectual and a coward. Spielberg is making a point, a bad point, and we need to pay attention.… Read the rest

Biologists who had done no primary research in human sciences nevertheless issued anathemas on it.… Read the rest

Beware of neo-Deistic pseudoreligion.… Read the rest

Confusing religion and race is a clever trap the religious have laid for a worried government rightly anxious about race. … Read the rest

‘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

NAGPRA proceeds from an antievolutionary perspective grounded in fundamentalist religious belief.… Read the rest

‘A Russian, an Italian, could not justify beating his wife to death by referring to the customs of dear old Moscow or Calabria’… Read the rest

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

In their ‘paranoiac and demonological theology of science’ Lewontin, Kamin and Rose fire both barrels with equal monotony and imprecision: ‘determinism’ and ‘reductionism’. But the gallant little fire brigade has perpetrated a fatuous little book.… Read the rest

Women’s groups demand that murderers be treated according to laws of the land and not be allowed to find shelter behind the curtain of ‘culture’. … Read the rest

‘…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

‘To concede that no one ever believes something solely because it’s true is not to deny that anything is objectively true.’… Read the rest

‘Death and marriage may have fed and fuelled her writing, but – posthumously at least – they cramp her style.’… Read the rest

The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them.… Read the rest

Paul Krugman draws an interesting parallel with Stephen Jay Gould.… Read the rest