Year: 2010

‘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.’

Miller wonders why ‘unavailing Latinate neologisms’ convince so many people that something profound is being said.

Literary criticism, cultural studies; love letter and satire.

Consider Will Crooks, Labour MP. ‘Growing up in extreme poverty…Crooks spent 2d. on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled…’

‘But the gender-genre books that are based largely on clinical intuition and popular psychology typically lack a basic skepticism toward received wisdom and the willingness to wrestle with an idea to see who wins.’

‘…many of the widely accepted claims promulgated by therapists are based on subjective clinical opinions and have been resoundingly disproved by empirical research conducted by psychological scientists.’

‘…all but a fraction of his own writing molders unattended in America’s used bookstores. Like the New York Intellectuals with whom he was associated…he is referenced more often than read, a sad fate for a critic who wrote so much, so well and with such wit and insight.’

Beware of neo-Deistic pseudoreligion.

Centrality is so uncool that the margins are as full of people as Bangkok or the Aran Islands.

‘Mathematics is absolutely integrated with Western civilization, which conquered and dominated the entire world.’

‘Anthropologists are trained to appreciate cultural differences, but they can’t stand it within their own profession.’

No, linear doesn’t mean what pomos think it means.

The shift from logic to history, and the perennial appeal of irrationalist programs.

Why did it take the US Senate forty years to ratify the UN Genocide Convention?