Category: Zombies
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Bitch in the House
The Bitch in the House was a bestselling book in hardcover in 2002, and the first shot in one of the many battles in the so-called American culture wars. In the editor’s postscript to the 2003 paperback edition, she professed satisfaction at having had a dialogue with women. Some of the reviews, friendly and hostile,…
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Made to Stick
Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a pretty good book. It’s marketed as a business book by some major bookstores, but libraries may shelve it under social psychology. The Duke University Business school has promoted it on its web page. Co-author Dan Heath is a consultant in the Duke program.…
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Dawkins talks nonsense
Last Sunday, I drove to Ladysmith. I have had a cold, and I didn’t have the energy to ride, so I took a short trip up island. On the radio, Michael Enright and The Sunday Edition, with Enright interviewing Richard Dawkins. The interview is accessible as a Real Audio file – it runs to a…
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Are We Happy Yet?
Another new article on happiness studies, linked by AL Daily, from the online magazine Cato Unbound, called Are We Happy Yet? The Cato Institute, from its own Web page, seems to be a libertarian, probably right-wing body, which partially explains their disagreement with Richard Layard’s book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Layard is a…
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Zombies
It’s time to shake up the category list. Social Practice becomes Zombies. In the next few weeks Culture will be folded into Zombies. Politics is Liege & Lief, which is obscure but accurate, with an arcane folk music reference. The old names were too formal, and I had too many subcategories. I will phase out…
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Brighting the Spell
Daniel C. Dennett’s 2006 book Breaking the Spell, Religion as a Natural Phenomenon reached the bookstores a few months ahead of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
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I’m So Special
AL Daily had a link to the Detroit Free Press online, which ran David Crary’s AP book review . The book is getting some buzz – this morning CBC news was running an interview with Jean Twenge, the author of Generation Me, Why Today’s Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable…
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Bookstore Visit
While visiting Winnipeg for Christmas, I stopped at the downtown McNally Robinson store and looked at a copy of Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, by Thomas E. Kida. I did not need to buy this book, but I thought it addressed some key things that contribute to…
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Our Inner Ape
Frans de Waal’s popular books The Ape and the Sushi Master, and Our Inner Ape are entertaining, informative and useful. De Waal is leading expert on the behavior of animals, mainly apes, and particularly chimpanzees and bonobos, as observed in colonies in the Arnhem and San Diego zoos, and in the wild.
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Happy??
Yet again, someone sceptical of psychologists and educators who value happiness as a goal and a measure of good living, and the sceptical of the politics of happiness. See: Politicians, economists, teachers… why are they so desperate to make us happy?, by Frank Furedi, in the Daily Telegraph. I agree. Happiness is for idiots.