Strange and upsetting things have been happening in the world recently. A great many people are believing weird things and acting on them. Conspiracy theories such as Q-Anon (QAnon – Wikipedia) abound, whilst the consequences of irrational motivations can be terrible. Theodore Schick has offered one of the best primers I’ve come across for […]
How to Think About Weird Things by Theodore Schick Read More »
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (http://jenniferegan.com/about/), offers us this historical fiction set in New York in the first half of the 20th century. In this novel her focus moves from time to water, which is shown to have the power both to heal and to destroy. Anna Kerrigan, the novel’s
In this book David Gelernter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter), a professor of computer science at Yale, argues that the current trend in cognitive science toward ‘computationalism’ ignores basic, glaringly obvious truths about the difference between brain and mind. He makes the case that human intellect and selfhood are not merely the product of a calculating brain. He explores
Marina Warner’s (http://www.marinawarner.com/home.html) achievement in this excellent book is to trace the different meanings which have been ascribed to the female form throughout the ages. She examines a wide range of material art (Donatello, Vermeer, Judy Chicago), Greek mythology, the Bible, world literature, linguistics and mass media. Warner suggests that some women (the armed maidens of
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November 2018 will see the centenary of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 when the guns fell silent after 4 years of one the bloodiest conflicts in human history. There have been a huge number of histories of The First World War, and here is one with much to commend it. In Peter Englund’s
The Beauty and the Sorrow Read More »
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/copernicus/) publicly defended the hypothesis that the Earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the centre of a finite universe. Copernicus’s reordering of the universe mattered because it was the first in a string of new and daring scientific claims at odds with traditional representations of
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Jesmyn Ward (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesmyn_Ward) won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her 2011 book ‘Salvage the Bones’. Her 2017 novel is Sing, Unburied, Sing describes a black woman and her two children driving to a prison to pick up their white father. We are introduced to the convict’s son, Jojo, who has been forced to shoulder
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William J Broad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Broad) offers this fascinating history of oceanography. He points out the roll of the military in developing new technologies within that field. By 1957, the US Navy was searching for new weaponry to use in undersea warfare; a decade later, it had established a global network of deep microphones that spied on
The Universe Below Read More »
The way we see the world is radically different from our medieval forebears. How was this transition made? How did we exchange organised superstition for a science of the world based on evidence, experimentation, prediction and control? Jonathan Israel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Israel) here offers a magisterial study of what became known as ‘The Enlightenment’ (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/). Israel lauds
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