Month: April 2010

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

Terrorists, freedom fighters, fundamentalists, postcolonialism, the Enlightenment – all contested, as usual.

When students are consumers, they want what they pay for.

‘There is nothing sacrosanct about any culture or religion’s rituals. Cultures are neither monolithic, unchanging, nor without internal critique and resistance…’

Scientists are humorless nerds, and crop circles and crystals are more fun.

If Lentricchia and Said have joined, the revenge of the emeriti may not be so regressive after all.

A scandal in anthropology is complicated by politics, emotion, prestige – the usual sort of thing.

‘We are in danger of losing our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, disinterested inquiry.’

It’s important to distinguish between necessary, useful technicality, and jargon or pseudo-mathematics substituting for genuine rigor.

What if you want to talk about an authentic self instead of an ‘authentic self’?

The new chauvinism receives official sanction from government and academic institutions.

The world is a jungle, barely one child in a hundred escapes being murdered! Or so you would think.

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

‘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.’

Slaughter of innocents, human sacrifice, eternal torture – it’s all there.

The way to ‘reject the insipid relativism of the tabula rasa without denying or ignoring the freedom and variability of individual human beings and their cultures.’

Sally Satel looks at the way we construct narratives about our symptoms.

Book reviews in glossy magazines, worshipful interviewers on public radio and tv, ‘annoying’ as the ultimate condemnation…

What life was really like in Saddam’s Iraq and what it’s like now.

‘The anti-intellectuals are finally on the side of power at its most unforgiving and voracious.’