Welsh teachers’ union wants changes to law after independent panel orders school to take back pupil who shot teacher.
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Inevitably links go out of date.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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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.
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Revisionist History of Empire
Has Niall Ferguson’s TV version of Empire got its facts wrong?
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The ‘Jukes’ Family and Eugenics
Unnoticed methodological flaws, ideology deciding conclusions, fashion displacing careful analysis.
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That Would Explain a Lot
Psychologists study people’s tendency to over-estimate their abilities, especially the ability to think well.
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Darwin Knew About the Sweet Peas
Richard Dawkins says Darwin was right to bring together sexual selection and the Descent of Man.
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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.
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Does All His Own Stunts
Derrida does his own problematizing and struggles to find sufficiently gnomic replies.
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Education for Profit
The EU may decide to ‘liberalise’ higher education, putting an end to government subsidies. What price history or philosophy, one wonders.
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The Red Queen Process
Inclusive fitness, the utility of altruism, gene shuffling, the mumbling professor turns into Indiana Jones. The importance of William Hamilton.
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Vice-Chancellor and Minister Disagree
Cambridge doesn’t attract enough working class students, says Hodge; it does, says Sir Alec.
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Rebel From Newark
Leslie Fiedler loved to smash his own idols, could leave nothing unsaid, disdained subtleties, and crowed at the grave of modernism.
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Caught Reading in School!
Principal to teacher: your students were reading instead of watching television. Don’t let it happen again!
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Another ‘The Dog Ate My Data’ Case
This time it’s the pro-gun scholar who can’t find his figures.
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Surveys, Damned Surveys and Statistics
Where is that evidence again?
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Free Speech For Me But Not For You
Radicals when on the bottom, censors when on top. Napoleon, anyone?
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Celebrate or Be Dull, Ben Okri Says
Okri says Britain must respect its living writers.
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Caricature or Anti-Semitism?
Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring his Children’ is a powerful piece of visual rhetoric. Is it anti-Semitic if Saturn is Sharon?
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Public Distrust of Science
The Royal Society is concerned about media coverage of new research before it has been peer reviewed (which does not mean checked by the House of Lords).
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Alas, Poor Roses
Oliver Curry reviews a collection of arguments against evolutionary psychology edited by Steven and Hilary Rose. He finds their case unconvincing, to say the least.