EGGHEAD CHOICE – Crack open for a hard boiled think

Even something as quotidian and seemingly inconsequential as swearing can be subject to theory. Why do we swear, and what function does it fulfil? Can we infer anything from cultural or historical variations in the practice of swearing? Is it, for example, always intemperate behaviour, and always (in some form) aggressive? Is it always offensive? […]

The last person to have read most of the published output probably lived in the 1500s! No person can now read more than a microscopic fraction of the published word (in any of its many formats). Guides, literary criticism and anthologies can offer a tool for the bewildered. Literary criticism, particularly, not merely enthuses about authors and

E.M. Forster stated ‘Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him’. This is exactly the sentiment that inspired the physician and writer Raymond Tallis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Tallis) to pen his latest book, The Black Mirror: Fragments of an Obituary for Life. It contemplates a life looked back on from beyond; a meditation on being

We are all living poorer lives because of cheats, tax dodgers, criminals and the corrupt. The scale of wealth that is stolen from you should make you boil with rage. And it’s not just in hopelessly brutal and corrupt regimes in Africa, South America or Asia that it takes place. It’s in Europe and North America.

With a condescending smirk it’s easy to dismiss intellectuals as a bunch of inconsequential twits. Happily, they confine themselves to ‘ivory towers’ in places like Magdalen College, Oxford. Wrong! Intellectuals and thinkers of various stripes have had an enormous impact on the world and all who live in it. The consequence of their thought is profound. What

Following on from the global success of his book ‘Sapiens’ (2014, http://sbr.lanark.co.uk/?p=5180 ), Yuval Noah Harari (http://www.ynharari.com/about/) offers us a terrifying vision of the life forms to which, even now, we are giving birth. For 70,000 years Homo sapiens has been the smartest life form on the planet. We love to think so. But one way to depict

When economists seek to explain Brexit, Donald Trump and the rise of populism/nationalism, the concept they most often reach for is ‘globalisation’. Goods and services, it seems, can be produced almost anywhere on the planet and consumed anywhere else, rapidly. This has had profoundly dislocating effects on patterns of employment, income and population movement over

In each of our individual genomes we carry the history of the whole of our species. Since scientists first read the human genome in 2001 it has been subject to all sorts of claims, counterclaims and mythologising. Drawing together the latest discoveries in this rapidly changing area of science, Adam Rutherford (http://adamrutherford.com/) shows us that in