Advertising disguised as news, a trap that even reporters don’t always see.
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Inevitably links go out of date.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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Time for Psychologists to Join the Darwinian Revolution
Frans de Waal’s new book examines the potential of evolutionary approaches to the social sciences, and also the misapplications.
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GM Foods Could Be Good For You
Are unthinking objections to genetically modified food indicative of a world view which is at odds with the rational, open and questioning values of science?
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Greatest Happiness v. Winners and Losers
Alan Ryan explains John Rawls’ insight into the flaw in Utilitarianism.
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They Respectfully Disagree
Christopher Hitchens and Katha Pollitt argue about The Nation, Iraq, Viagra, Norman Mailer, pacifism, guilt by association, whither the left, and more.
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Impostor Syndrome and Banal Jokes
Susan Greenfield discusses women in science.
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Universities and Egalitarianism
Arnold and Huxley, Leavis and Snow, dustmen and doctors, prostitution and debt, tuition or taxation, all part of the argument.
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Where is the Outrage?
Salman Rushdie ponders all the new ‘Rushdies’ that are springing up around the world.
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Oh So That’s What Truth Is!
“We will defend it because it is truth, and you can’t deny truth.” Thus spake the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court of his monument to the Ten Commandments.
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Nussbaum on Rawls
Martha Nussbaum on John Rawls’ much-needed correction of Utilitarian-economist versions of morality.
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‘Philosophical laughing’
Groups can encourage people to take extreme positions, whence innovation is born.
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‘Tell that to the Buddha’
David Lodge’s book on consciousness and fiction is too accomodating to cultural relativists who say the self is a peculiar Western invention, but interesting anyway.
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Death Sentence for Heresy
A historian reports on the death sentence for a colleague in Iran who dared to call for an end to blind obedience from the laity.
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Another Disputed Tenure Decision
As so often in these cases, opinions differ on whether there are legitimate reasons or only political ones for a denial of tenure.
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Popular History and its Enemies
Is the problem that the work is over-simplified, or that it’s commercially succesful? Orlando Figes is not the first to wonder.
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Advertisers Influence Drug Research
Ad agencies own companies that ghostwrite articles for medical journals.
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Grammar for Language Teachers
It is difficult to teach a language without learning it first.
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What of Step-dogs and Step-sofas?
Simon Blackburn says Steven Pinker omits too much middle ground in The Blank Slate.
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‘Our genes are even stupider than we are.’
Louis Menand is not keen on The Blank Slate
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Yes I mean No I mean Yes
Harvard invites then uninvites then ununinvites poet Tom Paulin to lecture.