Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

CHOICE CLASSICS - A pick from the enduring classics

A worthy winner of the ‘Booker of Bookers’, Midnight’s Children (1981) is a fantastic achievement in fiction by British Indian Salman Rushdie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie and http://www.salman-rushdie.com/ and  http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/18/specials/rushdie.html), this is already deemed a classic. It is a sophisticated blend of magical realism and historical fiction setting before us the (un)reality of post-colonial India. The tale is delivered in gloriously witty and […]

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Essayism by Brian Dillon

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

Debates about whether the digital world is shortening attention spans rumble on. School teachers now report that pupils can’t concentrate for long, and the likely cause is the constant distraction of digital gadgets and social media. University teachers report that year one is remedial work, an exercise in basic education. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/3342827/Half-of-all-universities-have-to-teach-remedial-maths-and-English.html) No doubt there is

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Behave

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Robert M. Sapolsky (https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/robert-sapolsky, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky) is a distinguished primatologist working broadly in the life and social sciences to examine human behaviour, manifestations of which, he writes, belong to the nervous system and to sensory stimuli. Some of human behaviour is purely mechanical, with payoffs in dopamine, that ‘invidious, rapidly habituating reward.’ Other aspects are located

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The Evolution of Beauty

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

In this book Richard Prum (http://prumlab.yale.edu/) argues that natural selection is not the only evolutionary mechanism at work in animal life. Beauty and desire in nature are also dynamic forces, and those features in males that females prefer in choosing mates evolve rapidly. In a nutshell, each species evolves its own standard of beauty by

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