Debt and the equation marks=money can poison the teacher-student relation.
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Inevitably links go out of date.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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The Times on Christopher Hill
‘No other historian had equalled Hill’s ability to blend a deeply sympathetic understanding of the poor and unlearned with a seemingly limitless knowledge of intellectual and religious doctrine and strife.’
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Christopher Hill Obituary
The Marxist historian of the world turned upside-down.
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The Old ‘Science is Superstition’ Ploy
Jonathan Reé reviews Dawkins’ new book: ‘Dawkins campaigns against superstition with the blind fervour of a religious fanatic.’ Good; too bad there aren’t more like him.
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Fabricated Memories Can Be Scary Too
Two Harvard psychologists test the reactions of people who say they have been abducted by aliens.
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News Flash: Enlightenment Hostile to Religion
A new book on the Enlightenment’s near-obsession with Judaism is a cautionary tale against ‘the seductions of rationalist absolutism.’ What of the seductions of irrationalism?
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Robert Merton
Obituary of innovative sociologist of science.
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Merton Obituary in New York Times
Role models and self-fulfilling prophecies and ‘an extraordinary range of interests that included the workings of the mass media, the anatomy of racism, the social perspectives of “insiders” vs. “outsiders,” history, literature and etymology.’
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Watered-down Math Books
Teach history by all means, but don’t de-emphasize deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs.
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On Channel 1 Tonight: Junior Threatens Teacher
Parents don’t believe their children behave badly in school, so one plan is to use CCTV and then show them the evidence.
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How Many Kinds of Truth Are There?
Does the CIA know it when it sees it? Do UN inspectors? Truth commissions? Journalists, spies?
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Richard Dawkins Answers Questions
On poltergeists, the tooth fairy, God-shaped holes, surprise arrivals at Pearly Gates, and 42.
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Women Are Mediocre
Oh dear, how depressing. We have fewer stars and fewer total failures; we bunch up in the middle.
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Susan Sontag is not a Postmodernist
‘Even as her early criticism anticipates every academic trend from Cultural Studies to Queer Theory, she has been resolute in her resistance to everything postmodern, insisting on standards, morals and distinctions and the authority of art, experience and truth.’
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What Working Class?
No fantasy is too extreme when one wants to build some luxury flats.
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Passions Rule
Scholars in different fields are looking at emotion. (The list of books at the end of this article inexplicably omits Simon Blackburn’s Ruling Passions.)
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Ringing Tone Provokes Suspicion
John Gray reviews Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, and says the obsession with freedom is a leftover from Christianity.
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A Devil’s Chaplain Reviewed
Kenan Malik says ‘an obsessive concern with reason seems to me to be a virtue not a vice.’
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Orwell Again
Hitchens, Menand, Wieseltier go to buffets over the Meaning of Orwell.
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Analogies Don’t Work
Historians consider various popular analogies for the Iraq situation, and point out the bad fit.