I was so cheering for what Polly Toynbee was saying about the 70s: Are the 2020s really like living back in the 1970s? I wish …: Most 70s imagery is a deliberately manufactured caricature, with its garish wallpaper and avocado suites, an ignored time zone between the swinging 60s and glitzy greed-is-good, big bang, big hair 80s. It’s an image that ( Read more... )

On the one hand, obviously (???) there is something problematic about societal obligations upon women to go into seclusion when they're menstruating -
On the other hand, though that part of my life is long behind me, there were certainly times when I would have liked to withdraw from the pressures for a day or so and just chill out with a hot- ( Read more... )

Spotted on Twitter: RT if you would absolutely, in a heartbeat, give up your savings/discretionary income/wealth if it meant you would solve/end world hunger and poverty.
I dunno: this sounds to me a bit like the 'if you could do [desirable thing] by pressing a button which would kill a complete stranger a long way away from you, would you?' thought ( Read more... )

I noticed - flitting past me on Twitter the other day - somebody eyerolling at, if not codfishing, some bloke's plaint that watching Dunkirk had made him realise that The Modern Man does not have these Manly Challenges To Rise To -
And being a historian, I thought that, actually, there have been long generations, at least in my country, where most ( Read more... )

I was synchronicitously pleased to find this blog post crossing my line of sight earlier today: Prospecting for kryptonite: the value of null results, because I had been thinking about incrementality and the time it takes for things to see results, and this is not just about scientific research.
Lately, at a symposium-thing I was speaking at, in ( Read more... )

Various people have been posting this in various places and I think it has some really strong points to make about how problematic exhortations to step outside one's comfort zone are: “Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You”: Comfort Zones, Vulnerability and Success.
Thinking about it further, the idea that one should step outside one's personal ( Read more... )

Further to my comments on a post by
( Read more... )

So far, comments to my post yesterday about the concept of 'books that changed my life' pretty much confirm my own feeling that if books do affect us, it's by a process of influence or catalysis -

I.e. it's about what a reader gets out of a particular text at a particular time in their life (and it may not be a high-culture text at all, says woman ( Read more... )

Having one of those days when I don't feel anything inspiring or sparking off a post, but still feel I should post something, because I am in the habit of posting something every day.

So I'm going with being meta about doing things as a habit.

Which I think can be a rather good thing, because it gets me into the momentum of doing something rather ( Read more... )

I cannot remember the first time somebody told me not merely that the end of the world is nigh, but giving a specific date - primary school? definitely secondary school. (I mean, quite apart from the whole everybody going boom in a nuclear war which was such a motif in my adolescence.)

Plus, honestly, once one's read Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of ( Read more... )