Author: Ophelia Benson

Books by a superb (albeit incorrigibly centrist) reporter and a radical social critic.

Debate human nature.

Relativity has been attacked in the name of US pragmatism, German idealism, English Hegelianism, French Bergsonianism (by fellow Jew Henri Bergson!), Soviet “diamat” (dialectical materialism) and Nazi “Deutsche Physik”

We have needed Sagan ever since Copernicus removed us from the center of the universe.

On NPR’s Science Friday in 1996, the rising popularity of pseudoscience and the importance of critical thinking.

Paddy Doyle’s timeline of Irish Industrial Schools and failed attempts to reform them.

Paddy Doyle has a large collection saved.

Michael Foot, A C Grayling, Tom Paulin, Andrew Motion, Ian Mayes at ceremony to do that.

A ministerial working group in the Home Office charged with injecting religious ideas ‘across Whitehall’.

A world cured of its worst remediable deprivations and horrors is worth aiming for.

Appendix F – a must read.

Documents seen by the BBC suggest the archbishop ignored the advice of doctors and therapists who warned that Hill was likely to re-offend.

The survey shows that Muslims do not form a single homogenous community.

Chills the blood.

Iran’s most prominent political dissident talks to the philosopher.

It is forbidden to work as a teacher under the current puppet regime. Teachers must recieve a warning; next time, a beating; next, death.

Hundreds of Iranian online journals have been protesting against media censorship by renaming their blogs after pro-reformist newspapers and websites that have been banned or shut down by the authorities.

Cites sorrow and anger, demands apology for insult to honour of prophet.

Natalie Angier unimpressed by Bush’s assumption that prayer is some sort of miracle Vicks Vapo Rub for the national charley horse.