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Inevitably links go out of date.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.

Study on Affirmative Action in US Higher Education

Study blames admissions policies that favor children of alumni, and the movement to tighten admissions standards, for failure to narrow racial gap.

January 10, 2003
‘Cultural Difference’ and its Discontents

Brian Barry’s Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism was short-listed for the British Academy prize, which rewards academic excellence combined with accessibility to the general reader.

January 10, 2003
Did the Chinese Discover America?

Renting the Royal Geographical Society lecture hall and inviting an audience is one way to get attention.

January 9, 2003
The Attention of People Who Care

David Bromwich disagrees with Louis Menand that dispassion is the proper state for a critic.

January 9, 2003
Exam Still Bowdlerizes Texts

New York Regents’ exam continues to re-write and abridge literary excerpts, despite promises not to. Quis custodiet?

January 8, 2003
Less Optimistic But More Impatient

Edmund Gordon studies the achievment gap between black and white students.

January 8, 2003
Language Has to be Taught

And the television doesn’t do the job.

January 8, 2003
Richard Sennett on the Cello and Respect

The sociologist is more ambivalent than he was in his ‘ferocious Marxist phase’.

January 8, 2003
Fresh Meat? Old Meat? Scraps?

Did hunting shape human evolution, or was it foraging and scavenging? Or both?

January 7, 2003
Edge Science Questionaire

Edge asks scientists what they would tell the President, if he asked them, are the most pressing science issues he should be attending to. Alas, he hasn’t asked.

January 7, 2003
More on the Edge Question

The New York Times editorial on Edge’s science question, with extracts from several answers.

January 7, 2003
Is Pointing Out the Obvious ‘Racist’?

Culture minister worries aloud about glamorization of guns by rappers, finds self ‘at the centre of a race row’.

January 6, 2003
Is Language a Spandrel?

Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch think it may be, Pinker thinks the idea is eccentric.

January 5, 2003
Is It Distraction, or Multi-Tasking?

Can students learn critical thinking while playing solitaire or surfing the Web?

January 4, 2003
Hidden Ecological Explanations

Is culture a human category, or can animals have it? Do orangs and chimps learn culture, or adapt their behavior to their environment?

January 4, 2003
When Good Scientists Go Bad

They become journalists and friends of the Raelians and are selected to ‘check’ the ‘evidence’ of cloned baby.

January 3, 2003
M.I.T. Investigating its own Laboratory

Physicist at M.I.T. accuses lab of hiding flaws in missile defense program.

January 2, 2003
An Evening in Hell

The MLA convention: interviews, fear and trembling, publish or perish, cutbacks, no vacancies, ‘literary theorists are the snappiest dressers’.

January 1, 2003
Paradigm Shift in Progress?

Physicists disagree about revisions to special relativity.

December 31, 2002
Research on Free Will

Is it an empirical question rather than a philosophical one?

December 31, 2002