More teenagers report being bored at school in the UK than in other industrialised nations. Let us hope the response is not to replace teachers with videos.
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Inevitably links go out of date.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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Scientists were unpopular then too
Even in that supposed heyday of reason, attacks on freethinkers were a favourite sport.
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Misanthropes can stay that way
Good news: people who urge grouches to ‘cheer up, you’ll live longer’ are wrong.
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Sexist or witty?
Is a poster of a shirtless woman at a Motor Show a stupid throwback to the ’50s or an amusingly knowing and harmless bit of fun? What does it mean that a woman designed the poster? And that a government minister (also a woman) is not amused?
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Galileo and the gang
Is the conflict between science and religion inevitable, or a result of tactical decisions?
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First rule: get the evidence right
If you want to make an argument, it’s no good saying the flood ate your homework.
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The power of facing unpleasant facts
One independent thinker with an aversion to tribalism and cant pays his respects to another.
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Trinidadian guppies and Arabian babblers
Shouting at predators, risk-taking, the Big Mistake Hypothesis, altruism; the questions about cooperation and evolution go on being asked.
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Tversky and Kahneman on irrationality
Nobel prize-winner and his late colleague explored the illogical ways humans make decisions.
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Report undermines its own message
Nuffield Council on Bioethics releases report on behavioural genetics, but guides the press to focus on peripheral issue of designer babies.
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Hot and cold running Psychoanalysis
Is extensive therapy necessary both to survive family life and to raise children who can survive family life?
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Not new and not science
There is a difference between science and computational play; metaphors can illuminate but not predict.
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Suspect anyone wearing a halo
Hitchens thinking through Orwell and himself at the same time.
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Guns and probate
Mistakes in evidence, however small, can undermine a case.
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Ideologically driven review
Historians dispute a review by a non-historian who seems to have read a different book.
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To forget the past…
As evidence of Stalin’s mass killings is uncovered, many Russians don’t want to know.
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Martyrdom myth defies the facts
The political uses of putative martyrdom, and the dangers.
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Questioning the motives
Has inequality increased in the last two or three decades, and is it a problem if it has, and is it invidious even to mention the subject, and if so, why?
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Hermeneutics of New Jersey
Deconstructing, psychoanalysing, close reading or rather viewing, rewinding ‘The Sopranos’…are academics watching a little too much television?
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Nurture versus nurture
What seems like the reasonable compromise position, that human nature is half genes and half upbringing, can still get it wrong, Steven Pinker says. Sometimes it’s 100% one or the other.