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How Eugenics Began
“Scheduled to read a paper at a meeting of the British Association in 1866, Galton felt ill, excused himself, arranged to have the paper read for him by another, and hurried away. It would be not until...
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Medieval Spells
Pugin, Ruskin, and the Gothic Revival Hullo, what’s going on here? Is this an old movie set, or something carelessly lost in translation, or an Australian architectural joke? Driving down from a rainy...
View ArticleJohn Searle on Mind
There have been a number of books on mind and consciousness in recent years, but for my money the clearest and most attractive writing on this subject is still John Searle’s. I got only half-way...
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Jayant Patel — the full story
Seven years after his appointment as Director of Surgery at Bundaberg Base Hospital, six years after nurse Toni Hoffman warned of a mounting toll of patient deaths, five years after he escaped from...
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Young Layard of Nineveh
A. H. Layard, by William Brockedon Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894) is famous for discovering and excavating the palaces of the Assyrian kings. Undertaken between 1845 and 1851, this achievement made...
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Designer Tribalism — the communal great escape
“Turning their backs on institutions they believe dispensable, simplifying arrangements they do not understand, there is hardly a painful lesson in the experience of mankind that communes have not...
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Inside Journalism
Mr Gunther and Mr Duranty [This article first appeared in the Autumn 2007 issue of The American Interest with the title “Over There, Then: John Gunther’s Inside Europe”] The War had started and...
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Jessica, Jesse, Joshua and the Cruel Sea
“Hail and sleet in the fierce squalls cut my flesh till the blood trickled over my face; but what of that? It was daylight, and the sloop was in the midst of the Milky Way of the sea, which is...
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Plato vs. Grand Theft Auto
“What the box office needed at Epidaurus, as it needs in movies today, are characters that are unstable, impulsive, and violent. Thus Oedipus. Thus Hamlet. Thus the figures in Anti-Christ.” It had been...
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Arabian Nights, Baghdad Days — romancing the Middle East
“For romantic aesthetes the discovery that in tribal societies the appealing and the appalling are often inseparable always comes as a disappointing surprise.” What’s with The Arabian Nights? How can...
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