Hitchens’s review of Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge starts well. Attentive readers of B&W may be able to answer his opening question.

Of what book and author was the following sentence written, and by whom? “Rarely has an Oriental servant of a white-identified, imperial design managed to pack so many services to imperial hubris abroad and racist elitism at home — all in one act.”

This was the quasi-articulate attack recently leveled, by a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, on Reading Lolita in Tehran…The professor described Nafisi’s work as resembling “the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India,” and its author as the moral equivalent of a sadistic torturer at Abu Ghraib. “To me there is no

Oh, god. I feel sick. I feel like screaming. I do, I feel like screaming and screaming and screaming.

An Islamic fundamentalist shot and killed a female Pakistani minister yesterday because of her refusal to wear a Muslim veil. Police said that the bearded attacker had singled out the prominent women’s rights activist in the belief that women should not be in politics. Zilla Huma Usman, the Punjab provincial minister for social welfare and supporter of President Musharraf, was shot as she prepared to address a public gathering in the town of Gujranwala…As party members threw rose petals at her, the gunman shot her in the head, police said. They identified the attacker as Malulvi Ghulam Sarwar and said

The opening of Steven Weinberg’s review of The God Delusion made me muse on something, not for the first time.

Of all the scientific discoveries that have disturbed the religious mind, none has had the impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. No advance of physics or even cosmology has produced such a shock…[A]mong the natural phenomena explained by natural selection were the very features of humanity of which we are most proud. It became plausible that our love for our mates and children, and, according to the work of modern evolutionary biologists, even more abstract moral principles, such as loyalty, charity and honesty, have an origin in evolution, rather than in a divinely created soul.

There is … Read the rest

So tell me something I don’t know.

A report of the American Psychological Association (APA) released today found evidence that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young women in advertising, merchandising, and media is harmful to girls’ self-image and healthy development…Sexualization was defined by the task force as occurring when a person’s value comes only from her/his sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics, and when a person is sexually objectified, e.g., made into a thing for another’s sexual use.

How could it not be harmful, for chrissake? What would it be, beneficial? How could it possibly be beneficial? Unless of course your dearest ambition from infancy on is to be a prostitute, and … Read the rest