Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman were two Israeli psychologists whose work revealed patterns of human irrationality, particularly the ways that our minds consistently fool us. They used the word ‘heuristics’ to describe the rules of thumb that often lead people astray, and investigated cognitive biases. One such rule is the ‘halo effect’, in which thinking […]
The Undoing Project Read More »
Many people, including myself, who have visited the battlefield of Culloden report being underwhelmed. It amounts to little more than a rickle of stones on a heather moor. The battle itself in 1746 had lasted less than an hour, and the forces on each side were small, even by the standards of the day. The
Culloden by Murray Pittock Read More »
Cosmology and theoretical physics are developing rapidly. For the general reader, then, what’s the best scientific account we have of reality in 2017? An overall picture is offered by Sean Carroll (https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/self.html) here. He seeks to make sense of the universe and everything in it, from protons to people, from the Big Bang to the origins
This year sees the 20th anniversary of Tom Wolfe’s landmark novel The Bonfire of the Vanities of 1987. Seven years prior to its publication I had been shaken to be told by a biblical scholar that Ecclesiastes doesn’t belong in the Old Testament. It is evidently a Greek text, he proclaimed, and is not consistent
The Bonfire of the Vanities Read More »
Psychology professors Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski offer this look at how the knowledge of mortality drives human culture. The authors’ contention is that fear of death has been a primary driving force of human creativity. They began working together on the elaboration of what they now call ‘Terror Management Theory’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory) in
The Worm at the Core by Sheldon Solomon et al Read More »
People in finance do not create wealth. They preside over it, and suck it away. That is one central point in this excellent new analysis by Rana Foroohar (Time magazine assistant managing editor and economics columnist). Eight years on from the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, the key lessons of the crisis of 2008
Makers and Takers by Rana Foroohar Read More »
Midnight tonight (31 December 2016) will be one moment in the continuing flow of time, no different essentially from any other. Only because human societies are organised by collective effort, and require punctuation marks in their narratives, midnight will be made significant. The calendar will change to a new year. There will be fireworks, sentimentality,
Timekeepers by Simon Garfield Read More »
Much as life in Lanark and dear old Blighty is unsatisfactory we do not fear being snatched away to a detention centre and tortured because the government does not share our opinions. There are, of course, plenty of regimes in this world where that is the case. In 1990, Jaballa Matar, an exiled Lybian dissident
The Return by Hisham Matar Read More »
Ann Patchett’s (http://www.annpatchett.com/about/) new novel is an American family saga involving six children, 50 years and many coincidences. It opens with Bert, a father of three with another baby on the way, sneaking a kiss from Beverly, a married woman hosting a christening party for her second child, Frances. They’re drunk and it’s the Sixties;
