Janet Malcolm interviewed on journalists as vampires, psychoanalysis as literary technique, lawsuits and more.
Category: Latest News
Welcome to our archive of news stories relevant to the project of fighting fashionable nonsense. The stories are drawn from the electronic pages of the world’s media. On this page, you’ll find links to those stories that have been featured on Butterflies and Wheels during the current year. At the bottom of the page, you’ll find links to separate archives of stories from previous years.
We’re always pleased to hear about news stories that you think should be featured on Butterflies and Wheels. Just send an email here, if you want to point one out to us.
A note about links
Inevitably links go out of date. We suggest, therefore, that you make hard-copies of the stories that particularly interest you.
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Discrimination Against Men?
Women’s colleges are ‘all full of lesbians now,’ is one rumour. ‘And what if they are?’ asks Joan Bakewell.
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Competing Goods
Targets or no targets? How does one increase university admissions for excluded groups without discriminating against currently-included groups?
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Student Consumers
Spot on. John Sutherland on student evaluations: ‘the one criticism which is never made is: “This professor is just an entertainer”.’
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Liberty Letters
In The Great War we had liberty cabbage, now it’s…Freedom Toast? What planet is this again?
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Single-sex Education
St. Hilda’s college votes not to admit men.
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Single-sex Education Good for Women
‘Women benefit from a single-sex education, whereas men benefit from a mixed one,’ a former student at St. Hilda’s says.
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One in Four of Everyone Has Something
So if one in four has something, and one in four has a different something, and the number of somethings is large and growing…
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Missionary Formulas
Historian Jackson Lears suggests ‘providence’ might not be all that predictable.
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‘Honour crimes’ and cultural relativism
Is political correctness to blame for a lack of awareness about honour crimes?
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More on ‘Honour’ Killing
An Iranian woman writes for the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society on the murder of insubordinate women.
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Rorty Reviews Dewey Biography
More about events of his life than resonance of his ideas, Rorty says.
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Tinpot Trotskyists Running Bristol Admissions?
The Observer samples press coverage of the row over Bristol’s acceptance of lower marks for students from state schools.
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Green Welly Image
The Independent on Bristol’s admissions policy.
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Bristol University, social class and meritocracy
Can a university have too many well-off students?
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A Doomed Enterprise
John Haldane restates traditional view that religion is perfection of reason; Edward Skidelsky is not sure it can be done.
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Nonsense, Mistakes, Barrel-Scraping Insults
Todd Gitlin demolishes Alston Chase’s anti-intellectual version of what made the Unabomber.
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Dialogue
Two historians, one Tory one Labour, discuss Iraq and Tony Blair.
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Happiness and Positional Goods
If inequality makes the rich a little happier and the poor a lot more miserable, what then?
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Two Books on Islam Reviewed in Dissent
One makes lucid distinctions, the other leaves too much out.