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Index: Noted elsewhere

· In Rathcoole, a fear of the Taigs in the dark.

Thursday, 17 March 2011

The “Taigs” were Catholics. Though Mitchell didn’t know any, and his parents held no bias, the Taigs became the bogeymen of his boyhood. And, gradually, “the fear of the bogeyman turned to hatred”.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, History & Travel | | Comments (0)

· Reporters lost in a fog of radioactivity data.

Thursday, 17 March 2011

As a science reporter I love the metric system, but I do wonder if the public can easily understand that a change in radiation from 5 millisieverts per hour to 1,000 microsieverts per hour is actually a five-fold decrease in exposure rates?

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Science, Medicine & Technology | | Comments (0)

· Lionel Trilling’s bright lights, big city, mutated people.

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

“Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement,” Trilling said, that with the emergence of society, “something like a mutation in human nature took place.”

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· Obscure eggheads: ‘ If power corrupts, then lack of power corrupts absolutely’.

Tuesday, 15 March 2011

But money is certainly not the only coin in which the modern intellectual likes to be paid. There is, after all, nothing quite like celebrity, and proximity to power can easily become for an intellectual in search of renown what a candle is for a moth. If, as they say, power corrupts, then lack of power corrupts absolutely.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Politics & Culture | | Comments (0)

· The Japanese choice: panic or progress?

Tuesday, 15 March 2011

What the Japanese earthquake has proved is that even the oldest containment structures can withstand the impact of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history.

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· Nine books on ‘quakes that will fall off your shelves.

Monday, 14 March 2011

For as long as we have experienced seismicity, we have written about it, going back to the Book of Acts.

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· Solid facts for shaky journalists writing about seismic catastrophes.

Sunday, 13 March 2011

I am writing this text (Mar 12) to give you some peace of mind regarding some of the troubles in Japan, that is the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Science, Medicine & Technology | | Comments (1)

A cure for poets facing the ‘disabling embarrassment of being alive’.

Saturday, 12 March 2011

The true glory is that after death there is an absolute division, an unbridgeable gulf, between the man who grunts and snivels and prevaricates and procrastinates, and the writer who prophesies.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Poetry & Fiction | | Comments (0)

· Violence in the Old West? Only when the government marched in.

Thursday, 10 March 2011

The civil society of the American West in the nineteenth century was much more peaceful than American cities are today, and the evidence suggests that in fact the Old West was not a very violent place at all. History also reveals that the expanded presence of the U.S. government was the real cause of a culture of violence in the American West.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, History & Travel, Politics & Culture | | Comments (0)

· The bad taste of acrimony in a debate over genetically-modified food.

Thursday, 10 March 2011

It is indeed a pity that several aspects of debate in this country on genetically modified (GM) crops and foods have adopted the adversarial approach rather than a consensual one.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Politics & Culture, Science, Medicine & Technology | | Comments (0)

· ‘The Walking Dead’: Still dead, still ungrateful, still trucking.

Tuesday, 8 March 2011

The zombie keeps on: it’s what he does.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Film, Television, Video & Theatre | | Comments (0)

· College admissions: Why blight the hopes of 10,000 kids when you can blight the hopes of 25,000?

Monday, 7 March 2011

In my ideal world, each great university would seek the student body best fitted to make use of its resources, its community life and its idiosyncratic ways of doing things. The admissions frenzy would die down, and we’d be able to worry about the big issues — the real-world ones that affect the vast majority of young Americans who don’t attend selective colleges.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Psychology, Philosophy & Education | | Comments (0)

For Marvell, think Bernie Sanders with a growing ‘vegetable love’.

Sunday, 6 March 2011

Imagine if the most cunning and cosmopolitan poet of our era—John Ashbery, say—were a progressive US senator from a small state far from Los Angeles, New York, or Washington, along the lines of Bernie Sanders. Envision, too, that this poet/politician hides out in the margins of his poems, such that his angle on any subject, philosophical, religious, or political, atomizes into irreconcilable fragments—except that he also writes fierce, polemical pamphlets, though often without signing his name to them, and maneuvers under threat of exposure and censure.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices, Poetry & Fiction | | Comments (0)

· Newman’s quiet canonisation: no stigmata, please. We’re British.

Saturday, 5 March 2011

A study which, from its rueful opening anecdote about Cornwell’s first visit as a seminarian to Newman’s then very quiet grave, strives to paint a full and fair picture of an extremely talented, driven, passionate human being.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices, The Fortnightly Review of Books | | Comments (0)

· Arthur Green and ‘the possibilities and limits of Jewish theology’.

Saturday, 5 March 2011

You distinguish my views from earlier Jewish notions of an abstract deity by saying that I “flatly deny” divine transcendence. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Psychology, Philosophy & Education | | Comments (0)
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