Some people have King Charles' Head: the head-related leitmotif around these parts is Jeremy Bentham.
This week I encountered this:
Jeremy Bentham’s actual decomposing, severed head is now on display at UCL.
In the interests of accuracy, I should point out that it is not decomposing. It reacted very badly to the mummification process and was ( Read more... )

Intriguing article in Sunday's Observer which tries to get beyond the knee-jerk shock horror that there has been a demand at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) for the philosophy course to be a bit less dead and white - Are Soas students right to ‘decolonise’ their minds from western philosophers? - even if 'male' ( Read more... )

Jive talkin’: top philosopher says modern dance has lost its soul
(Enquiring minds wish to know, does Roger Scruton count as a top philosopher? Y/N)
This is particularly schadenfreudey for me to read, because what does Prof Scruton oppose to modern 'jerking like a frog’?
Why, good old, do I not remember an entirely similar moral panic about it (and ( Read more... )

(Stuff I have had open in tabs and thought, maybe that'll make a post, and post DO NOT HAZ.)
Dept of, wot abaht bestiality: Man jailed for sexually assaulting horse: Defence lawyer: “He has already sentenced himself to a lifetime of excruciating embarrassment”
Dept of Quis Custodiet? The unseen theft of America's literary history. Inside jobs, as ( Read more... )

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'Don't we all write about love? When men do it, it's a political comment. When women do it, it's just a love story'. I'd suggest that in fact it's when men do it, it is about the deep chords of the human heart, when women do it it's soppy wish-fulfillment, but her formulation works as well.

Photographer Nan Goldin burst on ( Read more... )

I was going to codslap this, about the 'hardwired difference' between m & f brains (because gender is just so biiiiiinary, right?), but here is a great rebuttal, which makes the points I would have done, and more. (Though I was going to say, if doing The Knowledge demonstrably alters adult cabdrivers' brains, we really don't think these things are ( Read more... )

David Birnbaum made his fortune selling jewellery to movie stars. Now he has published a 'remarkable and profound' investigation into the origins of the universe. Is there any reason to take it seriously? Just because he was rich enough to publish it as a glossy book rather than write it in purple ink on graph paper... I remain unconvinced.

I will ( Read more... )

Spam email with 'Urgent' in the subject line:
To: Everyone ( Read more... )

And today, my dearios, I think I shall recommend a movie about London. A movie which respects the innate geography of the city and doesn't have someone emerging from the Tube to turn into a street which is nowhere near that station. Or, as in the opening episode of Adam Adamant, has Our (time-disorientated, recently resuscitated) Hero emerging from ( Read more... )

A perennial favourite with my dr rdrs:

( Read more... )