Helena Echlin on the misery of being a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Yale. She has to stifle her urge to write ‘eh?’ in the margins, discovers that obfuscation is de rigeur, and that people who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages.… Read the rest

Do scientists ‘keep the faith’ and if so is that a good thing? Is religion a good source of morality?… Read the rest

What life was really like in Saddam’s Iraq and what it’s like now.… Read the rest

When students are consumers, they want what they pay for.… Read the rest

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘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

What is a government department doing endorsing the idea that traditions and myths count as evidence?… Read the rest

Book reviews in glossy magazines, worshipful interviewers on public radio and tv, ‘annoying’ as the ultimate condemnation…… Read the rest

Terrorists, freedom fighters, fundamentalists, postcolonialism, the Enlightenment – all contested, as usual. … Read the rest

‘Sexual selection really is a good candidate for explaining a great deal about the unique evolution of our species.’… Read the rest

‘the findings were nicely congruent with the hypothesis’ – yes, they always are, that’s the problem.… Read the rest

‘I don’t need a Hell to fear to be ethical, or a paradise to reward me for my good.’… Read the rest

‘He was very easily irritated by anything bogus, anything facile or hypocritical.’… Read the rest

Why did it take the US Senate forty years to ratify the UN Genocide Convention?… Read the rest

Sally Satel looks at the way we construct narratives about our symptoms.… Read the rest

‘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

The Bush administration wants scientists it can trust.… Read the rest

Why do people believe or disbelieve?… Read the rest