What life was really like in Saddam’s Iraq and what it’s like now.… Read the rest
Fashionable nonsense has been with us since the time that prehistoric man first transcribed Of Grammatology on to the walls of the Lascaux caves. Here we cast an eye back at some historical highlights.
Grade Inflation
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
When students are consumers, they want what they pay for.… Read the rest
Byatt Reviews Browne’s Darwin Biography
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘There has been a tendency among Marxist, or marxisant, critics of Darwin, and social Darwinism, to criticise, or ridicule, the theory as a simple product of the society in which it was developed.’… Read the rest
Kevin McDonald on Crews on Freud
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘psychoanalysis, unlike a scientific theory but very much like certain religious or political movements, has essentially been immune from attacks leveled at it either from inside or outside the movement.’… Read the rest
Francis Crick on Atheism
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘What could be more foolish than to base one’s entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at that time, now appear to be quite erroneous?’… Read the rest
Paul Boghossian on the Sokal Hoax
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘How, given the recent and sorry history of ideologically motivated conceptions of knowledge — Lysenkoism in Stalin’s Soviet Union, for example, or Nazi critiques of `Jewish science’ — could it again have become acceptable to behave in this way?’… Read the rest
Norman Levitt on Kennewick Man
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
What is a government department doing endorsing the idea that traditions and myths count as evidence?… Read the rest
Curtis White on The Middle Mind
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Book reviews in glossy magazines, worshipful interviewers on public radio and tv, ‘annoying’ as the ultimate condemnation…… Read the rest
Stanley Fish Defends Postmodernism
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Terrorists, freedom fighters, fundamentalists, postcolonialism, the Enlightenment – all contested, as usual. … Read the rest
Dawkins on Darwin’s Genetics
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘Sexual selection really is a good candidate for explaining a great deal about the unique evolution of our species.’… Read the rest
Webster Reviews Fisher and Greenberg
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘the findings were nicely congruent with the hypothesis’ – yes, they always are, that’s the problem.… Read the rest
Out of Islam
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘I don’t need a Hell to fear to be ethical, or a paradise to reward me for my good.’… Read the rest
Not What You Think but How You Think
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘He was very easily irritated by anything bogus, anything facile or hypocritical.’… Read the rest
Samantha Power on genocide and failures to prevent it.
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Why did it take the US Senate forty years to ratify the UN Genocide Convention?… Read the rest
Memory and trauma
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Sally Satel looks at the way we construct narratives about our symptoms.… Read the rest
Katha Pollitt on Multiculturalism and Women.
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘A Russian, an Italian, could not justify beating his wife to death by referring to the customs of dear old Moscow or Calabria’… Read the rest
‘Independent’ Peer Review
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
The Bush administration wants scientists it can trust.… Read the rest
Paul Kurtz on Belief
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Why do people believe or disbelieve?… Read the rest
Multicultural Pseudoscience
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Bernard Ortiz De Montellano on gibberish dressed up as education.… Read the rest
Richard Dawkins Karate-chops Fashionable Nonsense
Apr 10th, 2010 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Dawkins on fun and games.… Read the rest