David Lodge, while evading ‘the false intimacies of celebrity,’ discusses his new book of essays on that intersection.… Read the rest
All entries by this author
Anger is energizing
Oct 28th, 2002 5:50 pm | By Ophelia BensonNow that’s what I call good news. A piece in yesterday’s New York Times says that, popular wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding, pessimism and anger are not necessarily always unhealthy and their opposites not necessarily always therapeutic. Just exactly what I’ve always thought! I’m a basically cheerful sort, I think, but it’s an irritated sort of cheerfulness–the two go together. I get a lot of energy and motivation from my generalised anger. It means there are things to do, mistakes that need pointing out, stupidities that need correcting. One likes to feel useful. Julie K. Norem, a psychologist and author of the book The Power of Negative Thinking, says that anger is an energizing emotion. I feel vindicated, and … Read the rest
Sexist or witty? 
Oct 28th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Is a poster of a shirtless woman at a Motor Show a stupid throwback to the ’50s or an amusingly knowing and harmless bit of fun? What does it mean that a woman designed the poster? And that a government minister (also a woman) is not amused?… Read the rest
Misanthropes can stay that way
Oct 28th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Good news: people who urge grouches to ‘cheer up, you’ll live longer’ are wrong.… Read the rest
The oracular mode
Oct 27th, 2002 11:22 pm | By Ophelia BensonJudith Shulevitz wrote of Harold Bloom’s new book Genius, in the New York Times Book Review:
“He repeats himself so often that his favorite words acquire the ring of revolutionary slogans (Originality! Vitality!) or ritual denunciations (Resenters! Historicizers!). He makes grandiose and indefensible claims without explaining or arguing for them. He cloaks himself Wizard-of-Oz-like in the polysyllabic hermeticism of cabala and Gnosticism, with little seeming regard for the violence his borrowings may do to those systems or to the comprehensibility of his prose.”
Just so. I had the same problem with The Western Canon; Shakespeare; How to Read and Why. Bloom used to be (and still is when he wants to, it’s just that he mostly seems not … Read the rest
First rule: get the evidence right
Oct 27th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
If you want to make an argument, it’s no good saying the flood ate your homework.… Read the rest
Galileo and the gang
Oct 27th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Is the conflict between science and religion inevitable, or a result of tactical decisions?… Read the rest
Trinidadian guppies and Arabian babblers
Oct 26th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Shouting at predators, risk-taking, the Big Mistake Hypothesis, altruism; the questions about cooperation and evolution go on being asked.… Read the rest
The power of facing unpleasant facts
Oct 26th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
One independent thinker with an aversion to tribalism and cant pays his respects to another.… Read the rest
Hot and cold running Psychoanalysis
Oct 25th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Is extensive therapy necessary both to survive family life and to raise children who can survive family life?… Read the rest
Report undermines its own message
Oct 25th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Nuffield Council on Bioethics releases report on behavioural genetics, but guides the press to focus on peripheral issue of designer babies.… Read the rest
Tversky and Kahneman on irrationality
Oct 25th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Nobel prize-winner and his late colleague explored the illogical ways humans make decisions.… Read the rest
Not new and not science
Oct 25th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
There is a difference between science and computational play; metaphors can illuminate but not predict.… Read the rest
Difference Feminism
Oct 24th, 2002 | By Ophelia BensonSecond wave feminism has always had a radical strand. It has always been about
more than equal pay. It was also, for instance, about exposing and then discarding
banal conventional unreflective ideas that led to banal conventional unreflective
behaviour. Ideas about cooking and cleaning being somehow naturally women’s
work, for example, which led to men cheerfully lounging about while women put
in what Arlie Hochschild calls a second shift. And even more than that, unexamined
ideas about what women are like, what they want, what they should be and do.
David Lodge once remarked that women became much more interesting after feminism,
and his own novels bear this out, as do those of Michael Frayn and other male
novelists who … Read the rest
Guns and probate
Oct 24th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Mistakes in evidence, however small, can undermine a case.… Read the rest
Suspect anyone wearing a halo
Oct 24th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Hitchens thinking through Orwell and himself at the same time.… Read the rest
Martyrdom myth defies the facts
Oct 23rd, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
The political uses of putative martyrdom, and the dangers.… Read the rest
To forget the past…
Oct 23rd, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
As evidence of Stalin’s mass killings is uncovered, many Russians don’t want to know.… Read the rest
Ideologically driven review
Oct 23rd, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Historians dispute a review by a non-historian who seems to have read a different book.… Read the rest
Postmodernism and History
Oct 22nd, 2002 | By Richard J. EvansPostmodernism comes in many guises and many varieties,
and it has had many kinds of positive influences on historical scholarship.
It has encouraged historians to take the irrational in the past more seriously,
to pay more attention to ideas, beliefs and culture as influences in their own
right, to devote more effort to framing our work in literary terms, to put individuals,
often humble individuals, back into history, to emancipate ourselves from what
became in the end a constricting straitjacket of social-science approaches,
quantification and socio-economic determinism.
But this is postmodernism in its more moderate
guise. The literature on postmodernism usefully distinguishes between the moderate
and the radical. What I call radical postmodernism takes its cue from another
post, post-structuralism, … Read the rest
