Author: Ophelia Benson

Peer-review committee said he hadn’t provided ‘adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent-design theory, was correct.’

The Seville Statement on Violence was written in the language of sociopolitical activism, not that of science.

She refused to perform illegal abortions, so three men assaulted her

The impact of censorship is in fact to undermine progressive movements within minority communities.

I also strongly disagree with the implications of your statement that faithfulness and loyalty to the church and church leaders never permits expressions of disagreement, or questioning of our church leaders – especially in an academic setting.

Green belts, trees, women, poverty, empowerment, corruption, resistance.

Foucault cited Borges, but some of his followers cite the encyclopedia as fact.

The sequences used in Sheldrake’s research are not properly randomized.

I want to know, and many thousands of Muslim girls and women have a right to know, why understanding and infinite tolerance is practised with particular cultural traditions that are clearly oppressive of women.

On atheism and evidence for God

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.

‘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?’

‘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.