Author: Ophelia Benson

  • What a Good Idea!

    Simon Blackburn, Richard Dawkins and others call for Darwin Day.

  • Who Is Paying?

    Is conservative funding more focussed and coherent than the other kind? If so, why?

  • Never Met an Adaptive Tale He Didn’t Like?

    Sometimes economic explanations work better than evolutionary ones, says this review of The Blank Slate.

  • Revisionist History of Empire

    Has Niall Ferguson’s TV version of Empire got its facts wrong?

  • To Boldly Split an Infinitive

    Roy Hattersley cites Cobbett on grammar as a positional good, and calls a Tory MP half Polonius half rude mechanical.

  • Student Shoots Teacher, is Expelled, Then Unexpelled

    Welsh teachers’ union wants changes to law after independent panel orders school to take back pupil who shot teacher.

  • That Would Explain a Lot

    Psychologists study people’s tendency to over-estimate their abilities, especially the ability to think well.

  • The ‘Jukes’ Family and Eugenics

    Unnoticed methodological flaws, ideology deciding conclusions, fashion displacing careful analysis.

  • Darwin Knew About the Sweet Peas

    Richard Dawkins says Darwin was right to bring together sexual selection and the Descent of Man.

  • Things Fall Apart

    Well now…I must say, I’m a bit shocked. My comfortable certainties are all upset, what I thought I knew is sous rature, my binary oppositions are problematized, and things are just generally messed up. If the trendiest of trendy hippest of hippy French philosophers doesn’t like Seinfeld, well–well why bother, that’s all.

    Earlier on in the film, an interviewer from South African television chooses to open her questions with a reference to Seinfeld : does Professor Derrida see any affinities between his thought and this ironic, situation comedy? Derrida’s eyes narrow. “Deconstruction as I understand it doesn’t produce any sit-com,” he says in English, audibly putting the last words into pointed italics. “Stop watching sit-com. And do your homework. And read.”

    Read? Read? Can he be serious? Read instead of watching television? Do our homework instead of just sitting around being knowing? What the hell kind of injunction is that? What’s the matter with the guy? Has he come over all elitist and bourgeois and logocentric in his old age or what? And what’s with the scorn for darling sit-com? What’s up with that, huh? Sit-com is, like, the art form of the 21st century, doesn’t he know that? I think he needs to get out of Paris and smell the coffee.

  • The Red Queen Process

    Inclusive fitness, the utility of altruism, gene shuffling, the mumbling professor turns into Indiana Jones. The importance of William Hamilton.

  • Education for Profit

    The EU may decide to ‘liberalise’ higher education, putting an end to government subsidies. What price history or philosophy, one wonders.

  • Does All His Own Stunts

    Derrida does his own problematizing and struggles to find sufficiently gnomic replies.

  • Karl Marx Meets Leo Marx

    Policing the borders, becoming the Other, subaltern disciplines, historical privileging of the imperial metaphysic perspective as the agent of knowledge production. A feast of jargon awaits.

  • Vice-Chancellor and Minister Disagree

    Cambridge doesn’t attract enough working class students, says Hodge; it does, says Sir Alec.

  • Rebel From Newark

    Leslie Fiedler loved to smash his own idols, could leave nothing unsaid, disdained subtleties, and crowed at the grave of modernism.

  • Stop That This Instant!

    Oh my. We are in Alice country. A principal tells a teacher off because her students were engaged in an activity other than…watching television.

    Why, the little slackers! The naughty little skivers! What were they doing? Talking? Throwing spit balls? Composing new rap lyrics? Copulating? No. They were…it’s almost too painful to relate…they were reading.

    Well. We don’t want that kind of thing in the American school system, thank you. That sort of behavior leads to literacy, and elitism, and intellectual curiosity, and wanting to know more about things like history and philosophy. We don’t want that, now do we, no, because we’re glad to be a Beta. So the principal took to spying on the teacher to make sure she wasn’t letting those children read during television period any more. It’s heartening to know the US school system has such dedicated professionals at the helm, isn’t it.

  • Surveys, Damned Surveys and Statistics

    Where is that evidence again?

  • Another ‘The Dog Ate My Data’ Case

    This time it’s the pro-gun scholar who can’t find his figures.

  • Caught Reading in School!

    Principal to teacher: your students were reading instead of watching television. Don’t let it happen again!