De la lume adunate

Hundreds of students and academics from around the world have expressed outrage after   St   Andrews   University   refused to renew the contract of the only female   professor   at its Institute for   Gender   Studies . More than 1,000 students and academics have signed a petition condemning the decision by  St   Andrews  to part company with  Alison   Kerr . They say that  Kerr , an American philosopher who is director of the institute, is crucial to the department and its credibility. The course will now be taught by two  men  who, critics say, do not have a background in the subject. The campaign, Stand with  Alison , has attracted support from academics worldwide. Elinor Mason, a  professor  at the  University  of California, Santa Barbara, said: "I want to stress how valuable this programme is, and what a shame it would be to squander all the work that  Kerr  has put ...

These are addictive: twitter, facebook, instagram: they are weaponised. You have social statisticians and scientists and researchers and people in lab coats literally best minds of our generations figuring out how to addict you to the news. And if you fall for it, if you get addicted, your brain will get destroyed. This is the modern struggle.  The ancient struggle used to be the tribal struggle: you had your tribe of friends and family, you had your religion, you had your country, you had your loyalty and your nationality. At least you had meaning and support.  Modern life was so free that everything became atomised: you stand alone, you live in our apartment alone, you live in your house alone, your parents don't live nearby, your friends don't live nearby, you dont have any tribal meaning, you don't believe in religion anymore, you don't believe in country anymore. it's fine, you got a lot of freedom.  But now, when they come to attack you, you're alone and y...

The UK’s communications regulator,   Ofcom ,  interviewed more than 200 people   across the UK on how offensive they find a vast array of rude and offensive words and   insults . People were asked their opinion in 150 words in total. These included general swear words, words linked to race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, body parts and health conditions, religious insults and sexual references, as well as certain hand gestures. They were asked to rate words as  mild, medium, strong  or  strongest . And this is what  Ofcom  found. For general swear words, the following words were seen as... Mild Medium Stronger Strongest Arse Bloody Bugger Cow Crap Damn Ginger Git God Goddam Jesus Christ Minger Sod-off ...

It was a tale of two interviews on the Today programme this morning. First up on the show was Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, who has been instrumental in forming the UK government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, and whose virus modelling led to the current lockdown being put in place. On the show, the professor received an almost deferential line of questioning from Sarah Smith with his views seemingly taken as near-Gospel as he declared that a 'significant level' of social distancing could have to be maintained indefinitely until a vaccine becomes available. Then came along the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock. As you would expect, he was treated to the traditional Today programme mauling, as his record and pronouncements on testing, the growing virus outbreak in care homes and PPE were scrutinised by Nick Robinson. While Mr S thinks it's only right that Hancock faces tough questions, Steerpike can't help but wonder whe...

What is truth? You can speak of moral truths and aesthetic truths but I’m not concerned with those here, important as they may be. By truth I shall mean the kind of truth that a commission of inquiry or a jury trial is designed to establish. I hold the view that scientific truth is of this commonsense kind, although the methods of science may depart from common sense and its truths may even offend it. Commissions of inquiry may fail, but we assume a truth lurking there even if we don’t have enough evidence. Juries sometimes get it wrong and falsehoods are often sincerely believed. Scientists too can make mistakes and publish erroneous conclusions. That’s all regrettable but not deeply sinister. What is profoundly troubling, however, is any wanton attack on truth itself: the value of truth, the very existence of truth. This is what concerns me here. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s O’Brien held that two plus two equals five if the Party decrees it so. The Ministry of Truth exist...

In 2010, Jeff Bewkes, then CEO of Time Warner, was asked if he thought Netflix had any chance of taking over Hollywood. His sarcastic answer deserves to go down as one of the all-time dumb predictions. Bewkes (like the dude who wrote the internal Western Union memo that said telephones were a waste of time) was not taking Netflix seriously: ‘Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?’ A decade later, Netflix is not Albania. It’s imperial Spain during el Siglo de Oro. Massive, relentlessly mercantile and ruthlessly acquisitive, Netflix has rippled over the world to become one of the largest media businesses ever known. Count the hundreds of millions of subscribers, or the billion-dollar content deals. The old Hollywood system, the studios, the cinema chains — an entire infrastructure of production — has been torched and replaced by Netflix’s subscription-based streaming model. Its major competitors are all imitators: Hulu, Disney+, Apple TV, HBO Max and Amazon Prime Video. The ‘...