Category: Flashback

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.

‘But the gender-genre books that are based largely on clinical intuition and popular psychology typically lack a basic skepticism toward received wisdom and the willingness to wrestle with an idea to see who wins.’

‘We are in danger of losing our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, disinterested inquiry.’

Investors need to know the truth, but voters don’t. Or not.

Biologists who had done no primary research in human sciences nevertheless issued anathemas on it.

Deniers distort history in order to promote antisemitism and white supremacy.

Militant Islam and militant Christian fundamentalism are indeed related.

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.

Consider Will Crooks, Labour MP. ‘Growing up in extreme poverty…Crooks spent 2d. on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled…’

A scandal in anthropology is complicated by politics, emotion, prestige – the usual sort of thing.

Washington freed his slaves in his will, Jefferson did not. The reasons of each tell us much about American history.

Women’s groups demand that murderers be treated according to laws of the land and not be allowed to find shelter behind the curtain of ‘culture’.

‘We are born of primordial slime, not at the hands of a benevolent and concerned supreme being who lovingly crafted us from clay.’

‘We’re girls, so we’re less-than-nothings, Priscilla, 17, told Le Monde after her friend Sohane’s death.

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

Literary criticism, cultural studies; love letter and satire.

If Lentricchia and Said have joined, the revenge of the emeriti may not be so regressive after all.

‘In the clamorous and bloodstained souk of the world…people still go unrepentantly on looking out for good lives’

‘John does know more mathematics, more physics and more engineering than the average biologist. But he also knows more biology than the average biologist.’

Don’t essentialize Indianness, but you’d better get the Real India right.