Daniel Soar

On Sunday​, 30 September 2007, in the late afternoon, four men met in an airy, book-lined apartment in Washington DC and had a two-hour discussion around a marble table. The subject, it seemed, was the misguidedness, stupidity and sometimes dangerousness of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: over the previous few years each had published...

There is​ no reliable single view of a big city building. Take London’s tallest skyscraper, the Shard. Here’s one view: it looks like a blown-up version in glass and steel of Kim Il-sung’s Tower of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang – except it’s a monument to capital rather than revolutionary self-reliance. Both towers are steep pyramids, stretched vertically until...

Earlier​ this month, a small storm hit social media when it was revealed that a number of cultural studies journals had been the victims of a massive hoax. Three collaborators had submitted twenty ‘bat-shit insane’ papers – as they described them – to places like Gender, Place and Culture and Sex Roles. Four of the papers were published, and another three had been...

If you’re​ 18, without any experience of your chosen branch of higher education, your best hope of advancement – of learning to think like your elders – is to listen to your teachers, taking diligent notes. But that’s no good if what they’re saying makes no sense. Selin, the narrator of Elif Batuman’s novel, who is settling in to her first year at...