But he would have cut ‘today’s higher theoreticians’ to shreds.… Read the rest
Small World
May 22nd, 2003 8:20 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe Jayson Blair saga continues. There is a staggeringly bizarre interview with him in the New York Observer today. It’s interesting (to me anyway) that he chooses the same sentence from the long Times article on him that I remarked on the other day.
In The Times’ lengthy May 11 account of Mr. Blair’s long trail of deception, it reported that “the porch overlooks no such thing.” Mr. Blair found this funny. “The description was just so far off from reality,” he said. “The way they described it in The Times story—someone read a portion of it for me. I just couldn’t stop laughing.”
We must have noticed the same thing, or perhaps different angles on the same thing. The … Read the rest
Blooming Buzzing Confusion 
May 22nd, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Do we see what we see or is our brain stitching it all together?… Read the rest
Jayson Blair Talks
May 22nd, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘I just couldn’t stop laughing.’… Read the rest
Credulity About This or Skepticism About That?
May 21st, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Blumnethal on Clinton is not Saint Simon on Louis XIV, unfortunately.… Read the rest
How to Win the Argument Against Philistinism
May 21st, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘Not the kind of knowledge that flatters authorities,’ Frank Furedi says.… Read the rest
Where Did ‘Theory’ Come From?
May 20th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Morris Dickstein considers some roots.… Read the rest
Someone must pay
May 20th, 2003 | By Julian Baggini"For every winner, there has to be corresponding losers, and it has
nothing to do with skill, ‘investing’ or how popular you are."
Neil Collins, The Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2003
Like many opponents of the "something-for-nothing culture", Neil
Collins does not just believe that if something good is done someone has to
pay; he seems to regard it as a moral imperative that someone does. So irritated
is he in his attack on the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown,
from which the quote above comes, that he finds himself insisting that there
have to be multiple losers for a single winner, getting his grammar garbled
in the process. (If it’s a sub editor’s error it still … Read the rest
‘Infallible for 152 years, and now this! Oy!’
May 19th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Cronies, star systems, sanctimony, glitz – the Times after the Blair meltdown.… Read the rest
Damasio on Spinoza
May 18th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
His dissent on the prevailing view of the mind-body problem stood out in a sea of conformity.… Read the rest
These Predictions are Postdictions
May 17th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Michael Shermer looks at Moby Dick and the Bible as secret decoder devices.… Read the rest
The Presentation of Self in Presidential Life
May 16th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Ordinary millionaires without neckties and other varieties of manipulation.… Read the rest
Journalism, Truth, and ‘Truth’
May 16th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Julian Baggini says journalism’s goal of objectivity is neither anachronistic nor incoherent. … Read the rest
Hills of Beans
May 15th, 2003 7:33 pm | By Ophelia BensonHard on the heels of the story about New York Times reporter-trickster Jayson Blair comes this Guardian examination of the Jessica Lynch ‘story’ and the various forces that played into that exercise in media manipulation. Saving Private Lynch is one of the stories Jayson Blair was reporting on when he concocted the porch overlooking the tobacco fields and the herds of cattle, the porch that ‘overlooks no such thing,’ as the Times account says so acidly that I found myself wondering what the porch does overlook. A pile of rusting cars? A still? A tennis court? A swimming pool?
I thought when I first read the long Times story – so, they had him covering the Washington sniper, and then … Read the rest
A Heretic in the Church of Traumatology
May 15th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
New study of memory and repression won’t please ‘the psychobabblers and the melodramatists and the daytime-television bookers.’… Read the rest
The Rise of the Info-Novel
May 15th, 2003 | By Peter LurieWhat was it you wanted from that big new novel? If you’re looking for an education
about Victorian brothels, Dante studies during the 19th century,
iconography and iconology in art history, the structure and function of railroads,
the Allied retreat to Dunkirk, British scientific expeditions in the Himalaya,
Bobby Thomson’s Brooklyn-crushing dinger or any number of other subtopics in
history, philosophy, business or law, then you’ll likely find it satisfying
enough. But if you’re looking for the promise of invention, for a world created
and set in motion, for characters who grapple with ethical and moral dilemmas
that radically transform their perspective – the elements that make a great
and true novel – you’ll be disappointed.
I’m not arguing … Read the rest
Higher Education and its Discontents
May 14th, 2003 | By Ophelia BensonHigher education is a site where a lot of disputes, tensions, disagreements, irreconcilable opposites and incompatible goals meet and clash. Proxy battles are fought there rather than in the marketplace or the courts or government because the stakes are so much lower, having comparatively little to do with profit, prison, laws, or bloodshed. So silly or perverse or evidence-free ideas get a stage to rehearse on, and sometimes drown out better ideas – and Fashionable Nonsense is born.
We have a hard time even deciding what education is for. Many people, probably most, think it’s purely vocational. People go to university because if they don’t they’ll have to do dreary boring difficult low-status jobs for no money all their lives. … Read the rest
Gerald Holton Interviewed
May 14th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
The physicist, author of ‘Einstein, History and Other Passions’ talks about his work for Reagan’s commission on school reform.… Read the rest
Dodgy Educations?
May 14th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
What a lot of people in the Labour Cabinet studied useless subjects at university.… Read the rest
History is Bunk
May 13th, 2003 8:39 pm | By Ophelia BensonBut it’s not very surprising if we don’t value learning, effort, apprenticeship, craft, if we’re not eager to spend years learning to play the cello or write real poetry that rhymes and scans, or to read Gibbon or Montaigne or The Tale of Genji or any of those long-winded books people used to write because they had nothing better to do – it’s not all that amazing if we don’t want to do that, when our leaders have such a squalidly practical, utilitarian, narrow, worm’s-eye view of the value of education. School is for job training, and that’s that. At least, that’s that when it comes to publicly funded education: they don’t mind our getting purely curiosity-driven education if we … Read the rest
