Nobel prize-winner and his late colleague explored the illogical ways humans make decisions.… Read the rest
Not new and not science 
Oct 25th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
There is a difference between science and computational play; metaphors can illuminate but not predict.… Read the rest
Difference Feminism
Oct 24th, 2002 | By Ophelia BensonSecond wave feminism has always had a radical strand. It has always been about
more than equal pay. It was also, for instance, about exposing and then discarding
banal conventional unreflective ideas that led to banal conventional unreflective
behaviour. Ideas about cooking and cleaning being somehow naturally women’s
work, for example, which led to men cheerfully lounging about while women put
in what Arlie Hochschild calls a second shift. And even more than that, unexamined
ideas about what women are like, what they want, what they should be and do.
David Lodge once remarked that women became much more interesting after feminism,
and his own novels bear this out, as do those of Michael Frayn and other male
novelists who … Read the rest
Guns and probate
Oct 24th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Mistakes in evidence, however small, can undermine a case.… Read the rest
Suspect anyone wearing a halo
Oct 24th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Hitchens thinking through Orwell and himself at the same time.… Read the rest
Martyrdom myth defies the facts
Oct 23rd, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
The political uses of putative martyrdom, and the dangers.… Read the rest
To forget the past…
Oct 23rd, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
As evidence of Stalin’s mass killings is uncovered, many Russians don’t want to know.… Read the rest
Ideologically driven review
Oct 23rd, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Historians dispute a review by a non-historian who seems to have read a different book.… Read the rest
Postmodernism and History
Oct 22nd, 2002 | By Richard J. EvansPostmodernism comes in many guises and many varieties,
and it has had many kinds of positive influences on historical scholarship.
It has encouraged historians to take the irrational in the past more seriously,
to pay more attention to ideas, beliefs and culture as influences in their own
right, to devote more effort to framing our work in literary terms, to put individuals,
often humble individuals, back into history, to emancipate ourselves from what
became in the end a constricting straitjacket of social-science approaches,
quantification and socio-economic determinism.
But this is postmodernism in its more moderate
guise. The literature on postmodernism usefully distinguishes between the moderate
and the radical. What I call radical postmodernism takes its cue from another
post, post-structuralism, … Read the rest
Questioning the motives
Oct 21st, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Has inequality increased in the last two or three decades, and is it a problem if it has, and is it invidious even to mention the subject, and if so, why?… Read the rest
At the Bookfest
Oct 20th, 2002 4:25 pm | By Ophelia BensonI went to the Northwest Bookfest yesterday to hear Steven Pinker and William Calvin talk about brains and evolution. Pinker is here on a book tour with his new book The Blank Slate, and I also went to hear him Friday evening. The Bookfest event was particularly interesting, because it was a dialogue and a little bit less planned than a lecture necessarily is. Calvin is a neuroscientist at the University of Washington who, as he pointed out, like Pinker tends to write books for the general public. His latest book, A Mind for all Seasons, is about the likely ways climate change and the evolutionary pressures that go with it shaped the human mind, and he and … Read the rest
Hermeneutics of New Jersey
Oct 20th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Deconstructing, psychoanalysing, close reading or rather viewing, rewinding ‘The Sopranos’…are academics watching a little too much television?… Read the rest
How to discuss controversial subjects honestly
Oct 18th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Jared Diamond reviews book on evolutionary explanation of religion in which contentious, often oversimplified ideas are treated fairly.… Read the rest
Nurture versus nurture
Oct 18th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
What seems like the reasonable compromise position, that human nature is half genes and half upbringing, can still get it wrong, Steven Pinker says. Sometimes it’s 100% one or the other.… Read the rest
Pinker, Wright and Seligman chat
Oct 16th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Robert Wright invites Steven Pinker and Martin Seligman to talk about happiness, genes and psychology on Slate.… Read the rest
Relies too heavily on rhetoric
Oct 16th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
David Barash reviews S. J. Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.… Read the rest
Journalists adore, biologists not so much
Oct 16th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Paul Gross considers the reputation of Stephen Jay Gould among colleagues as well as the general public, and finds some discrepancies.… Read the rest
Audible gasp
Oct 15th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Even on the left, even the secular left, criticism of religion is not allowed.… Read the rest
Faked research and how it is caught
Oct 15th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Though the process worked and the fraud was exposed, scientists wish the process had worked a bit faster.… Read the rest
Good idea but over-optimistic
Oct 13th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Jeremy Rifkin’s ideas about hydrogen fuel cells may depend too much on starry-eyed hopes for ‘new consciousness’.… Read the rest
