Hermione Lee admires Salman Rushdie’s chutzpah: extolling unbelief in a Sunday address in King’s College Chapel.
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Inevitably links go out of date.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 Persistence of Superstition
Magical thinking thrives when the other kind can’t perform miracles.
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Rawls and Nozick
It is instructive to consider the two opposing principles of equality and liberty taken to the extreme conclusions Nozick and Rawls did.
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Threat Envy
When piety equals incitement to murder, not to mention murder itself, there is nothing to negotiate.
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How to Attract Corporate Interest
Issues of patenting and profit versus free exchange of knowledge surface in new stem cell research.
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Situatedness and its Discontents
Are we doomed never to be able to see past our own situations?
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Troublesome DNA
Mormon scientist faces excommunication after DNA casts doubt on Mormon heredity story.
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Alternative Medicine in a World of Science
Why do we heed “the songs of the New Age pied pipers whose melodies interweave quantum physics and the workings of the colon”?
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Be Cool, Don’t Study
Report says social conformity among black students works against academic achievement and for confronting the teacher.
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Hawks, Doves, Dawks, Hoves
Containment, Kurds in jeeps, re-alignments, suspicion, fear, hope, revolution from above, Paine, Trotsky, Bosnia, Iraq…it’s all so complicated.
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Anthropology and Consent
The Yanomamo want their blood samples back, and Neel is guilty of something or other.
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Religion Disguised as Science
Intelligent Design theorists upstage Young-Earthers.
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Blank Dogs and Straw Slates
Kenan Malik considers the implications of ideas about human nature.
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Evans on Williams on Truth
It’s good to read a philosopher who knows what he’s talking about when he talks about history, Richard Evans says.
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What Does ‘Jihad’ Really Mean?
A historian examines the word and its re-definition.
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Necessary Research or Delaying Tactic?
When is it time to say we know enough to act?
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Hattersley on Rawls
Rawls replaced evasion with precision, making bluster unnecessary when enemies of equality asked awkward questions.
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“Talking too properly”
Can identity politics make school seem “white”?
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Too Polite and Agreeable
Does ecofeminism even deserve a mention? Denis Dutton asks
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Green Spoon Worm Inhales Husband
David Barash reviews Olivia Judson’s book of sex advice for animals; disputes her definition of promiscuity, but on the whole approves.