Debt and the equation marks=money can poison the teacher-student relation.… Read the rest

‘No other historian had equalled Hill’s ability to blend a deeply sympathetic understanding of the poor and unlearned with a seemingly limitless knowledge of intellectual and religious doctrine and strife.’… Read the rest

The Marxist historian of the world turned upside-down.… Read the rest

Jonathan Reé reviews Dawkins’ new book: ‘Dawkins campaigns against superstition with the blind fervour of a religious fanatic.’ Good; too bad there aren’t more like him.… Read the rest

Two Harvard psychologists test the reactions of people who say they have been abducted by aliens.… Read the rest

A new book on the Enlightenment’s near-obsession with Judaism is a cautionary tale against ‘the seductions of rationalist absolutism.’ What of the seductions of irrationalism?… Read the rest

Obituary of innovative sociologist of science.… Read the rest

Role models and self-fulfilling prophecies and ‘an extraordinary range of interests that included the workings of the mass media, the anatomy of racism, the social perspectives of “insiders” vs. “outsiders,” history, literature and etymology.’… Read the rest

Teach history by all means, but don’t de-emphasize deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs.… Read the rest

Parents don’t believe their children behave badly in school, so one plan is to use CCTV and then show them the evidence.… Read the rest

Does the CIA know it when it sees it? Do UN inspectors? Truth commissions? Journalists, spies?… Read the rest

On poltergeists, the tooth fairy, God-shaped holes, surprise arrivals at Pearly Gates, and 42.… Read the rest

Oh dear, how depressing. We have fewer stars and fewer total failures; we bunch up in the middle.… Read the rest

‘Even as her early criticism anticipates every academic trend from Cultural Studies to Queer Theory, she has been resolute in her resistance to everything postmodern, insisting on standards, morals and distinctions and the authority of art, experience and truth.’… Read the rest

No fantasy is too extreme when one wants to build some luxury flats.… Read the rest

Scholars in different fields are looking at emotion. (The list of books at the end of this article inexplicably omits Simon Blackburn’s Ruling Passions.)… Read the rest

John Gray reviews Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, and says the obsession with freedom is a leftover from Christianity.… Read the rest

Kenan Malik says ‘an obsessive concern with reason seems to me to be a virtue not a vice.’… Read the rest

Hitchens, Menand, Wieseltier go to buffets over the Meaning of Orwell.… Read the rest

Historians consider various popular analogies for the Iraq situation, and point out the bad fit.… Read the rest