(This is a selection of Gandhi’s observations on consistency and changing one’s mind) My Inconsistencies I DECLINE to be slave to precedents or practice I cannot understand or defend on a moral basis. (YI, 21-7-1921, p228) I must admit my many inconsistencies. But since I am called ‘Mahatma’, I might well endorse Emerson’s saying that… Read More Mohandas Gandhi: My Inconsistencies
Sabine Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist who writes books and runs a YouTube channel (with 618,000 subscribers at time of writing) called Science Without the Gobbledygook. Born in Frankfurt, she studied mathematics at the Goethe Universität and went on to focus on particle physics – her PhD explored the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider… Read More Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: ‘There are quite a few areas where physics blurs into religion’
Zoe Williams Gen Z and their language: nothing can ever be mean, it always has to be abusive. Nothing can ever be painful, it always has to be traumatic. Nothing can ever stir up a bad memory, it always has to be triggering. Don’t get me wrong, I will always naturally side with the young,… Read More In the war between snowflakes and boomers, I’m with the kids. If only it wasn’t so easy to laugh at them …
Annie Lord Dating apps have changed us and in reality there’s probably no going back. When people don’t use apps, it doesn’t mean they start meeting in person, it just means they don’t meet anyone at all. A friend of mine recently compared the situation to Uber and the way the ride sharing app monopolised… Read More Swipe fatigue, or the rise and fall of dating apps
Michael Wood The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka; edited by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch. In September 1917, having just discovered he had tuberculosis, Franz Kafka took a break from his work at an insurance company in Prague and spent eight months with his sister Ottla in the village of Zürau, now called Siřem. He also seemed… Read More Cage in Search of a Bird
S.K. Arun Murthi I wrote a short critical article a few weeks ago on the ideas of some ancient Indian schools of thought. My critique was aimed at revealing how such ideas are pseudoscientific and pseudo-philosophical and, therefore, incompatible with that of modern science (I had written this article in the context of ISRO co-hosting the ‘Akash… Read More The Illogic and Inanity of the Religious Right in India
First posted January 24, 2017 Jerzy Krzyżanowski The Captive Mind (1953) has been compared to the two most revealing and penetrating works on the same subject previously published – Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Read an interview with him in 2003, the year before he… Read More The Captive Mind revisited
By Suzanne Bearne When Gayle Macdonald reached a summit in Spain’s Sierra Nevada mountain range earlier this year, she didn’t just stop and take in the moment. Instead, the 45-year-old did what a great many people would do – she looked for the best spot to take a selfie for her social media accounts. Gayle… Read More ‘It’s so liberating’: The people quitting social media
First posted June 12, 2015 To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care any more. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators… Read More Lee McIntyre. The Attack on Truth and our age of willful ignorance
First posted March 27, 2012 ‘Do you know’, Napoleon once said to Fontanes, ‘what astounds me most about the world? The impotence of force to establish anything. There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind. In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind’ Conquerors, you see, are sometimes… Read More Albert Camus: The Almond Trees (1940)
After the truth-shower 