I’ve said elsewhere that our vision of politics is being corrupted by a well-meaning but misguided epistemology of compassion: increasingly, we consider the person or group demanding a right to be the most trustworthy source of information about whether they deserve it. Anyone aggrieved, we . . . . Continue Reading »
The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. That from a study forwarded along to Richard Florida by Cambridge ‘personality psychologist’ Jason Rentfrow. Dig deeper, and the following . . . . Continue Reading »
Since the mid-’80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation. The specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the ’80s; now it’s China and . . . . Continue Reading »
“Why should an intelligent person believe in God?” That was the first question posed to Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks at a dinner for religion journalists sponsored last night by the Templeton Foundation, by the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn. Rabbi Sacks, the author of eighteen books . . . . Continue Reading »
David Brooks’ recent column on genius , which offered a portrait of the Mozart who excelled by logging his ten thousand hours of rote practice to get on sooner to the good stuff, seemed to gibe poorly with not only our romantic understanding of unique human excellence but our practical . . . . Continue Reading »
It is generally accepted by both the left and the right that science itself is a morally neutral enterprise, since it merely creates the mechanisms of power that can be used for moral and immoral purposes alike. In a public speech a few years ago, President Bush expressed this commonly-held view, . . . . Continue Reading »
“There is a complexity to human affairs,” David Brooks has announced, “before which science and analysis simply stands mute.” This is correct, but in comes in the context of a column that seems to cut in a strange way against it. It is as if we all contain a multitude of . . . . Continue Reading »
Something to lift Rod out of his necrosexual funk : urban chickens have hit Drudge . . . . . Continue Reading »
Andrew has a fairly careful and modest essay at the Times on the progress of religious faith in the face of scientific progress. The issue of whether faith should gird us to not fear scientific truth is an intriguing one; the Holocaust was scientifically true, after all, meaning the facts could not . . . . Continue Reading »
I’ve just finished a draft of a dissertation chapter that dredges up one of Richard Rorty’s few, all-too-few references to Philip Rieff. Rorty liked Rieff’s remark that “Freud democratized genius by giving everyone a creative unconscious.” Harold Bloom, no antagonist . . . . Continue Reading »
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