The historian Barbara Fields and her sister, the sociologist Karen Fields, open Racecraft, their collection of linked essays, by denying that there are such things as races. Race today does not,...
In a tongue-in-cheek editorial in the February 1927 issue of the Journal of Educational Research, the psychologist Guy Whipple announced that ‘the age-old perplexity of heredity has been...
A huddle of elderly people trudge through ankle-deep snow, pushing a wooden freight car along a barely visible set of tracks. The women are wrapped in headscarves, the men wear fur hats and thick...
Back when the Independent was young and thriving, the paper used to sponsor lunchtime ‘theatre conferences’ at the Edinburgh Festival in association with the Traverse. The description...
Ferdinand de Saussure, who died in 1913 at the age of 55, sowed the seeds of structuralist thought that first took root in linguistics, then effloresced throughout the 20th century in fields as...
A new form of colonialism was born in the second half of the 19th century, largely in response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Of its many theorists by far the most influential was Henry Maine, a...
In 1975 Benedict Anderson first visited the extensive monastery of Wat Phai Rong Wua, one of dozens in central Thailand; he returned in the 1990s and again a few years ago. Any wat is an imagined...
The Owl Man represented raw nature against the pasteurised alternative: traumatised sheep dancing to the beat of Danny Boyle’s Wagnerian lightshow.
Rachel Havrelock’s River Jordan is broad in scope, subtle in interpretive detail and written in lucid prose, with an assured mastery of the relevant scholarship – all the more...
In October 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that George Soros had violated insider trading laws more than two decades ago in dealings with the French bank Société...
Monroe’s beauty is dazzling, blinding. Of what, then, is she the decoy?
There are plenty of reasons for parents to push their children about, or rally them when they seem to slump. But it’s important to listen to them too, unless they’re rehearsing the...
Habit, Samuel Beckett says in his essay on Proust, substitutes the ‘boredom of living’ for the ‘suffering of being’, and he has a point. Human existence is an acquired...
Fifty years ago, Walter Ong startled classicists with the proposal that learning Latin offered medieval and Renaissance boys a rite of passage not unlike Bushman puberty rites. Torn from the...
Sometimes, reading the weekly Work section in the Guardian can be sad. ‘The office as a playground is back in fashion,’ one recent front-page story says. ‘The midwives were...
‘Nice story’, Freud says when Jung gives him an account of a patient’s pathology. The tone is amused, but a sense of shock lingers, an ironically disguised disapproval of...
Alone Together is a work of atonement for the things Sherry Turkle missed or got wrong in her earlier work on computers and people.
Now that diagnoses are understood to be more or less authoritative forms of consensus, our beliefs about what constitutes madness are up for grabs.