Author: Ophelia Benson

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

Dawkins on fun and games.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

‘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?

No it’s not just an accident that the character who gets Tom Hanks killed in Saving Private Ryan is both an intellectual and a coward. Spielberg is making a point, a bad point, and we need to pay attention.

In their ‘paranoiac and demonological theology of science’ Lewontin, Kamin and Rose fire both barrels with equal monotony and imprecision: ‘determinism’ and ‘reductionism’. But the gallant little fire brigade has perpetrated a fatuous little book.

Psychoanalysis was never, despite Freud’s ‘positivist rhetoric,’ a science; it was a ‘purely speculative enterprise,’ argues Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen.

What is the difference between genuine inquiry and the sham and fake variety?

Dowsing, homeopathy, Tarot cards and their relevance to mental health professions, and, of course, alien abductions.

Do scientists ‘keep the faith’ and if so is that a good thing? Is religion a good source of morality?

What is a government department doing endorsing the idea that traditions and myths count as evidence?

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

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

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

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