Month: April 2010

‘We no longer defer to bishops or politicians; scientists are simply facing the same fate.’ Yes but bishops are one thing and scientists are another. We can demand that scientists produce evidence, but what evidence can a bishop offer?

In the 1992 article that he expanded into an excellent book, Barber examines the ways Identity and Shopping are dividing the world between them.

Extreme diets and extreme investing, diversity all around, along with a consensus as ironclad as any in the ’50s.

Being on the side of the rich and powerful ought to make it hard to play victim, but the right in the US manages it by seeing ‘liberal’ bias in the media even when it’s…not there.

Is feminism about being a fragile flower needing protection and consolation at every hint of conflict? Or is it about being a cactus and fighting back. Wendy Kaminer disavows florality.

James Wood on the grim outlook for social realism and ‘hysterical realism’, which may allow a space for the aesthetic and the contemplative again.

Meera Nanda had good reasons to fight against patriarchal, upper-caste Hindu traditions that would have suppressed all she valued. Science was not ‘elitist’ or Western but a way of life and a philosophy for social action.

Dawkins on fun and games.

‘He was very easily irritated by anything bogus, anything facile or hypocritical.’

‘How, given the recent and sorry history of ideologically motivated conceptions of knowledge — Lysenkoism in Stalin’s Soviet Union, for example, or Nazi critiques of `Jewish science’ — could it again have become acceptable to behave in this way?’

Helena Echlin on the misery of being a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Yale. She has to stifle her urge to write ‘eh?’ in the margins, discovers that obfuscation is de rigeur, and that people who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages.