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 …
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.
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.
My old friend Randy has mentioned, in a post called Aaden. Adan, Aden etc. that he recently got some unwanted, unfriendly comments on a blog entry he posted over two years ago, Bad Baby Names. Randy was caught commenting on people who bestow unique and precious names on their unborn offspring.
Denis Dutton, the editor of Arts & Letters Daily likes Roger Sandall, who publishes essays online at a site or sites called The Culture Cult and Spiked. His most recent essay is called “See Here, Ms Truss, The Civility of Archaic Man”. (The dateline at the end says January 2005, which is wrong – the …
Theodore Dalrymple has produced a steady flow of articles and essays, published in The Spectator, The New Criterion, and City Journal. Denis Dutton has featured many of his essays at Arts & Letters Daily. In 2001, Dalrymple published a collection of his essays in City Journal, over the period from when he first wrote for …
Steve sent me a link to the George Mason University’s STATS site which “monitors the media to expose the abuse of science and statistics before people are misled and public policy is distorted”. They issue an annual list of stories that used misleading or false information, the Dubious Data Awards. Their top story for 2005 …
After The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell’s next book was Homage to Catalonia, which was about the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, he published the novel Coming Up for Air, a first person narrative covering a few days in the life, and many years in the memories of George Bowling. Bowling is a 45 …
The Free Press has published a couple more stories about crystal meth addiction and the governments’ strategies to restrict supply of meth. Last Tuesday, January 4, 2006, there was a Bruce Owen, “Mom blames crystal meth for daughter’s death”, published electronically at McIntyre’s site. On Friday, January 6, 200, there was a story that pharmacists …
An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (ISBN 1-890318-47-7) makes an argument for high culture and aesthetics as a civilizing force. The author, Roger Scruton, is a philosopher, a conservative writer, and a critic of postmodern ideas in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. His stated purpose, in the preface to the American edition …