‘It was fairly obviously a joke,’ says student editor of headline ‘Kill Levinsky, win a Robin reliant’.
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Inevitably links go out of date.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.
-
Feds to Investigate Biology Professor
US professor, naturally enough, refuses to recommend students who don’t believe in evolution. But John Ashcroft is Attorney General.
-
Fishy Tomatoes and Moneyish Rockets
Richard Dawkins suggests that subtle judgment is better than gut reactions, and that muddleheadedness helps no one.
-
Made-Up History
Someone saw some armor sometime and said it was authentic but where the armor is now, no one knows.
-
Six Years and $60,000
Imagine what six years reading $60 k worth of decent books about subjects other than oneself might have done…
-
What Role For School Targets?
Achievement targets in UK schools may be ‘counter-productive’.
-
Prisoners are Intentional Systems
Genetic determinists and environmental determinists are both mythical beings, Daniel Dennett says.
-
Satire Confusingly Like Real Life
The Onion on pity for skeptics. Sounds all too familiar.
-
Hugh Trevor-Roper
His ‘approach to history was…based not so much on original research as on wide reading’ including ‘economists, sociologists, philosophers, art historians and even anthropologists and psychologists.’
-
Well Who Did Move my Cheese?
Appropriately acid look at self-help ‘books’. ‘It’s very cheap and obvious to laugh at self-help books (which is no reason not to do so)’.
-
Richard Sennett
Works as an academic sociologist, but doesn’t really write academic sociology.
-
The Blockbuster Effect
Are books that aren’t likely best-sellers doomed?
-
Steve Jones on Raelian Clones
It’s a failure of education that editors take the Raelian story seriously, Jones says. Cloning is not clowning.
-
Hugh Trevor-Roper
The Independent’s obituary of the historian who ‘enjoyed vendettas as well as friendships’, as any historian should.
-
Networks
Six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Networks are either a promising new field, or over-hyped. Or both.
-
Tom Tomorrow
The People want tax cuts for the rich, it’s left-wing elitists who don’t. Slippery word, ‘elitist’.
-
Precautionary or Libertarian
Freeman Dyson on biotechnology, the future, and a debate in Davos.
-
What Everyone Else Thinks? Think the Opposite
Christopher Hitchens loves mess on the carpet, Stefan Collini says in The London Review of Books.
-
Classical Economics and the Other Kind
Who defines ‘rational’ and ‘works’ and ‘sorts out’, anyway?
-
Good Idea? Or Idiotic?
At least the teacher is ‘bothered’ that the lyrics refer to women as bitches and hoes. ‘It’s dehumanising,’ he shrewdly notices.