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...

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Ailments of the Tongue: Medieval Grammar

Barbara Newman, 22 March 2012

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...

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Superficially Pally: Richard Sennett

Jenny Turner, 22 March 2012

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...

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‘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...

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Alone Together is a work of atonement for the things Sherry Turkle missed or got wrong in her earlier work on computers and people.

Read more about A More Crocodile Crocodile: Machines That Feel

Shaky Ground: Autism and Madness

Adam Phillips, 23 February 2012

Now that diagnoses are understood to be more or less authoritative forms of consensus, our beliefs about what constitutes madness are up for grabs.

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Altruists at War: Human Reciprocity

W.G. Runciman, 23 February 2012

How is it that the members of a species as greedy, quarrelsome, egoistic and deceitful as ours still manage to live together in sufficiently harmonious societies?

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The Me Who Knew It

Jenny Diski, 9 February 2012

I was in my late thirties before it struck me that there was something odd about the tableau I have in my mind of a familiar living-room, armchair, my father in it, silvery hair, moustache, brown...

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Judas’ Gift: In Praise of Betrayal

Adam Phillips, 5 January 2012

In 1965-66 the erstwhile folk singer Bob Dylan released a great trilogy of albums, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and set off on a world tour that would...

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Austere, prickly, solitary, Claude Lévi-Strauss is the least fashionable, and most influential, of the postwar French theorists. Lévi-Straussians are a nearly extinct tribe in...

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Am I a spaceman? Wilhelm Reich

Adam Phillips, 20 October 2011

In a Freud Anniversary Lecture given in New York in 1968, Anna Freud looked back with nostalgia on the early days of psychoanalysis. ‘When we scrutinise the personalities who, by...

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This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been...

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Diary: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

Jenny Diski, 22 September 2011

Darwin observed and wrote about his children, as did Freud. And so did that particularly unpleasant behaviourist father in the movie Peeping Tom, made around the same time as Dr Milton Rokeach’s dinner...

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Rangatiratanga: Maori

J.G.A. Pocock, 8 September 2011

To explain why Judith Binney – who died in New Zealand in February – is a major figure in contemporary historiography it is necessary to explain why the history of her country has...

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On the Beach: Privacy

Jenny Diski, 28 July 2011

Christena Nippert-Eng loves the beach in spite of the noise, the bugs, the pebbles, the filth and the fact that her dermatologist insists she wear factor-60 sunscreen from April to October. It’s a nexus...

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Robert Friedman’s Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America came out in 2000. Two years before that, in June 1998, he received a phone call from Mike McCall, an FBI agent. McCall...

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Short Cuts: The Bourne Analogy

Daniel Soar, 30 June 2011

Spies aren’t known for their cultural sensitivity. So it was a surprise when news broke last month that IARPA, a US government agency that funds ‘high-risk/high-payoff research’...

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Great Man: Humboldt

David Blackbourn, 16 June 2011

Alexander von Humboldt was once called the last man who knew everything, the last generalist before an age of specialisation definitively set in. His work ranged across geography, geology,...

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