‘Indian history from the perspective of the Hindutva ideology reintroduces ideas that have long been discarded and are of little relevance to an understanding of the past.’
Year: 2010
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And ‘Post-Contemporary’ means…what, exactly?
If you number your paragraphs, will people mistake you for Adorno?
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When Religion Steps on Science’s Turf
Richard Dawkins on the cowardly flabbiness of the intellect that afflicts otherwise rational people confronted with long-established religions.
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An ex-Muslim woman speaks out – and has to flee for her life.
Most government-funded Islamic clubs ‘are run by deeply conservative men and perpetuate the segregation of women.’
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Human Rights and Asian Values
Dissent is part of all cultures, Asian decidedly included.
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Report on Resistentialism
Betrousered, two-eyed philosopher Ventre considers a world in which Things are Against Us.
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Why Lit-crits want economists to sound more like lit-crits.
Paul Krugman draws an interesting parallel with Stephen Jay Gould.
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Katha Pollitt on Multiculturalism and Women.
‘A Russian, an Italian, could not justify beating his wife to death by referring to the customs of dear old Moscow or Calabria’
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Stanley Fish Defends Postmodernism
Terrorists, freedom fighters, fundamentalists, postcolonialism, the Enlightenment – all contested, as usual.
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Grade Inflation
When students are consumers, they want what they pay for.
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What we need is a robust universalism.
‘There is nothing sacrosanct about any culture or religion’s rituals. Cultures are neither monolithic, unchanging, nor without internal critique and resistance…’
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Deep, unconscious anti-science bias.
Scientists are humorless nerds, and crop circles and crystals are more fun.
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Literature and theory duke it out.
If Lentricchia and Said have joined, the revenge of the emeriti may not be so regressive after all.
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The Yanomamo Controversy
A scandal in anthropology is complicated by politics, emotion, prestige – the usual sort of thing.
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Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism
‘We are in danger of losing our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, disinterested inquiry.’
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Susan Haack on Vulgar Rortyism
It’s important to distinguish between necessary, useful technicality, and jargon or pseudo-mathematics substituting for genuine rigor.
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Professionalization in the Humanities
What if you want to talk about an authentic self instead of an ‘authentic self’?
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McCarthyism’s Indian Rebirth
The new chauvinism receives official sanction from government and academic institutions.
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Frank Furedi on Paranoid Parents
The world is a jungle, barely one child in a hundred escapes being murdered! Or so you would think.
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So Sylvia Plath was a Poet?
‘Death and marriage may have fed and fuelled her writing, but – posthumously at least – they cramp her style.’