Dancing with the devil is an old pursuit among French writers. Even such a stalwart of the Enlightenment as Diderot created a fictional character (the seductive Nephew of Rameau) who could remark, “If ...
“Science is about is not ought,” John Staddon repeats in variation throughout his new book, Science in an Age of Unreason. But people who are so obsessed with the best world possible that they dismiss ...
"Drunk as a lord" hardly applies to Lord Taverne of Pimlico, the sober, polymathic and persuasive author of "The March of Unreason" (Oxford University Press). Although not a scientist himself, Taverne ...
LAST month, young historian-and-writer Patrick French and I were thrown out of the plush bar of the Howard Hotel in London into the equally plush lobby by a hawk-eyed maitre d' whose voice was as evil ...
A friend recently wrote a book subtitled “Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason.” Examples of the unreason that exist today will be in the comments section ...
He may have a point: Certainly, unreason can be every bit as “human” as the Greeks believed rationality to be. You don’t have to be a Freudian, for example, to recognize the importance of the ...
Book Tour is a Web feature and podcast. Each week, we present leading authors of fiction and nonfiction as they read from and discuss their work. When scholar, blogger and author Susan Jacoby traveled ...
Everybody is familiar with the caricature of the fundamentalist preacher or rigid authoritarian priest who, possessing special knowledge his tribe trembles at, pops off about things he doesn’t ...