The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton: a big bang moment - review by Lorraine Daston in The Guardian. "Wootton’s aim is to offer a new interpretation of what he contends still deserves to be called the scientific revolution. This makes for a big book, with some historiographical chapters (and appendices) that are unlikely to be of interest to readers who are not historians of science over the age of 50.... Compressed into a few sentences, the major theses of this book sound unsurprising. The scientific revolution was not just the motor of modern history, it was the model of modernity. Rational, calculating, advancing at breakneck speed, respecting no authority: science after Newton seemed to embody the power and ever expanding possibilities of a society fixated on the future rather than the past. This is the narrative upon which university professorships and whole departments of the history of science were established after the second world war, and the narrative that a whole generation of historians of science were weaned on. Yet Wootton believes that historians of what he calls the 'post-Kuhn generation' – that is, roughly those who came of age in the 1980s and 90s – have broken with the faith and denied the scientific revolution’s significance as “the big bang” moment of modernity."
Iris Murdoch is ‘promiscuous’ while Ted Hughes is ‘nomadic’. Why the double standards?- article by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe in The Guardian. "We have been astonished by the number of reviewers who have been so fiercely judgmental of Murdoch’s personal life;... it is particularly galling to see many reviewers concentrating, sometimes rather salaciously, on Murdoch’s sex life and savagely criticising her for 'promiscuit'. John Carey uses the word twice in his article (Sunday Times) and Jonathan Gibbs is uneasy about 'the promiscuity of Murdoch’s intellectual affairs' (Independent). Roger Lewis writes rather shockingly that 'had she been from the working class, instead of a fellow of an Oxford college with heaps of honorary degrees, she’d have been a candidate for compulsory sterilisation' (Times). We have yet to read similar personal attacks on the behaviour of Michael Oakeshott – the political theorist and one of Murdoch’s correspondents – who was nicknamed 'dipstick' during his army years because of his sexual philandering. ... So men are glorious phallic trail-blazers when they tear through many women’s lives whereas women who have had many lovers are 'ruthless' and 'self-indulgent'. How have such double standards survived in an intelligent reading population of the 21st century?"
Are scientists easy prey for jihadism?- article by Paul Vallely in The Guardian. "A study of 18 British Muslims implicated in terrorist attacks found that eight had studied engineering or IT, and four more science, pharmacy and maths; only one had studied humanities. ... This is no coincidence, concludes Martin Rose, the British Council’s senior consultant on the Middle East and north Africa. Immunising the Mind – his report – gathers a wide spectrum of opinion in support of the contention that science education fails to inculcate critical thinking in the way that the debates within arts teaching do. Rose coins the notion of 'an engineering mindset', which makes science students easier prey for terrorist recruiters."
‘How do we keep up the fight for democratic values? With solidarity and storytelling’- article by Shami Chakrabarti, extracted from her Reading Agency lecture 'On Liberty, Reading and Dissent', in The Guardian. "Months before the recent Paris atrocity, senior British politicians rushed to the French capital to say 'Je suis Charlie' in passionate defence of the free expression of murdered journalists, only to return to London with promises of crackdowns on debate in mosques and universities as part of their 'domestic extremism' agenda. The relevant consultation paper talks of refusing to engage with and denying platforms to extremist people who fail to share our 'British values', thus denying the universal values that we share with all democrats and the vital importance of winning the battle of hearts and minds with open engagement and fierce debate.... To be clear, just as libraries should be free and open, and books must be saved from the fire every time, debates, however shocking, difficult and painful, must be had. There is no such thing as no platform in the internet age, merely closed and narrow platforms where hate goes unedited and unchallenged by humanity and reason."
How Jane Austen’s Emma changed the face of fiction - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Emma, published 200 years ago this month, was revolutionary not because of its subject matter: Austen’s jesting description to Anna of the perfect subject for a novel – 'Three or four families in a country village' – fits it well. It was certainly not revolutionary because of any intellectual or political content. But it was revolutionary in its form and technique. Its heroine is a self-deluded young woman with the leisure and power to meddle in the lives of her neighbours. The narrative was radically experimental because it was designed to share her delusions. The novel bent narration through the distorting lens of its protagonist’s mind. Though little noticed by most of the pioneers of fiction for the next century and more, it belongs with the great experimental novels of Flaubert or Joyce or Woolf.... Austen ... was perfecting a technique that she had begun developing in her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility. It was only in the early 20th century that critics began agreeing on a name for it: free indirect style.... It describes the way in which a writer imbues a third-person narration with the habits of thought or expression of a fictional character. Before Austen, novelists chose between first-person narrative (letting us into the mind of a character, but limiting us to his or her understanding) and third-person narrative (allowing us a God-like view of all the characters, but making them pieces in an authorial game). Austen miraculously combined the internal and the external."
The science of learning: five classic studies - article by Tom Stafford in The Guardian. "A few classic studies help to define the way we think about the science of learning.... I’m a psychologist, so you won’t be surprised that my choice of classic studies concern the mental processes rather than the social processes involved in learning.... 1. Bartlett's 'War of the Ghosts'. Frederick Bartlett was a Cambridge psychologist who used a native American folk story called War of the Ghosts to show something fundamental about our memories. The story, and the research study he used it in, are related in his 1932 book Remembering.... 2. Skinner's rats and pigeons. BF Skinner is famous as the father of behaviourism, the school of psychology known for training behaviours in pigeons and rats.... His great achievement was to show how schedules of reinforcement, such as the delivery of food pellets to hungry rats, could condition behaviour.... 3. Dissociable memory systems.... Pioneering work led by Larry Squire showed that amnesic patients who had trouble remembering episodes of their lives had no trouble performing a new skill they had learned. Brain imaging has confirmed the basic division of labour between so-called declarative memory, aka explicit memory (facts and events), and procedural memory, aka implicit memory (habits and skills).... 4. Inside the mind of the chess masters.... Adriaan de Groot was a Dutch chess master as well as a psychologist.... One of his findings was that chess masters have an amazing memory for patterns on the chess board – able to recall the positions of all the pieces after only a brief glance. Follow-up work showed that they only have this ability if the patterns conform to possible positions in a legal game of chess.... The result confirms the idea that knowledge is a web of associations – when you have a large existing store of knowledge it is easy to spot patterns and so remember the positions of all the pieces. 5. Ericsson's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson is famous for claiming that all world-class performers have in common is that they have all invested at least 10,000 in deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means effortful, structured practice focusing on reducing your failings and errors, constantly pushing yourself to improve."
What Orwell can teach us about the language of terror and war - extract from Rowan Williams' 2015 Orwell lecture in The Guardian. "Creating a language that cannot be checked by or against any recognisable reality is the ultimate mark of power. What [Thomas] Merton characterises as “double-talk, tautology, ambiguous cliche, self-righteous and doctrinaire pomposity and pseudoscientific jargon” is not just an aesthetic problem: it renders dialogue impossible; and rendering dialogue impossible is the desired goal for those who want to exercise absolute power.... Both Merton and [George] Orwell concentrate on a particular kind of bureaucratic redescription of reality, language that is designed to be no one’s in particular, the language of countless contemporary manifestos, mission statements and regulatory policies, the language that dominates so much of our public life, from health service to higher education.... Bad writing is politically poisonous; good writing is politically liberating – and this is true even when that good writing comes from sources that are ideologically hostile to good politics (however defined). The crucial question is whether the writing is directed to making the reader see, feel and know less or more. And the paradox is that, even faced with systems that stifle good writing and honest imagining, the good writer doesn’t respond in kind but goes on trying to fathom what the terrorist and the bigot are saying, to make sense of people who don’t want to make sense of him or her. Failing to do that condemns us to bad writing and bad politics, to the language of total conflict and radical dehumanisation."
The Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas Sermon by Justin Welby. "What the shepherds glimpsed that silent night outside Bethlehem was an apocalypse, which means an uncovering of God’s final purpose for all the universe.... Today, across the Middle East, close to the area in which the angels announced God’s apocalypse, ISIS and others claim that this is the time of an apocalypse, an unveiling created of their own terrible ideas, one which is igniting a trail of fear, violence, hatred and determined oppression. Confident that these are the last days, using force and indescribable cruelty, they seem to welcome all opposition, certain that the warfare unleashed confirms that these are indeed the end times.... The shepherds see the truth, eternal, unwavering, divine truth, defined not by them, but by God: it was truth for them then, it is truth with us today. Goodness knows what they were expecting, but what they find is a new-born child – tiny, helpless and vulnerable. Yet they bow down in worship. The shepherds get this apocalypse.
Secret Teacher: WALT, WILF, EBI – we're awash with useless acronyms - article by 'The Secret Teacher' in The Guardian, Teacher Network. "When WALT and WILF made their grand entrance, telling the children what “We Are Learning Today” and “What I’m Looking For”, it was as though nobody in teaching had ever thought to mention what they were going to do in a lesson and why students needed to do it.... Good teachers, trained properly, do not need WALT or WILF (sorry, guys) for their students to do well. And children will still learn less in badly taught lessons whether WALT and WILF are present or not. It was the same when the new girls in town – WWW (What Went Well) and EBI (Even Better If) – were expected to transform marking standards. The result was that those who already marked diligently now took three times longer to get through a set of books, putting further strain on their work-life balance and causing increasing discontent. Those who weren’t marking properly before, still didn’t bother. This frustration can quickly turn into negativity and before you know it, you have committed teachers feeling inhibited by the rigidity of the system, while their less conscientious colleagues remain unfazed."
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe – review by Naomi Alderman in The Guardian. "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is an illustrated 'how things work' book. Munroe’s beautiful, ligne claire-style illustrations are perfect for this task: you can pick out the tiny individual chairs in a recreation room on an oil rig, or the parcels in the hold of a tall ship. He has chosen a diverse range of things to explain: from helicopters to a human cell, from the table of elements to the machines in a hospital room. And there’s that gimmick from 'Up-Goer Five': the book is written using only the top thousand (or 'ten hundred') words most commonly used in the English language. At some points, this produces passages of such startling clarity that one forgets there was ever anything difficult to understand about these phenomena. Explaining why there are U-shaped tanks of water in the centre of skyscrapers, the caption reads: 'This room is very carefully shaped so that when the building leans one way, the water runs the other way and hits the wall, pushing the building back up.' No jargon needed there; it’s precise, to the point and absolutely fascinating."
Patrick Ness: ‘You’re 10, a refugee in a foreign country. What the hell do you do?’- interview by Sarah Crown in The Guardian. " 'I love the chosen-one narrative; long may it reign,' Ness says. 'But it seems to me there are two periods of challenge in a teenager’s life. The first is when you become a teenager and realise: "I’m separate from my family." That experience is vital but it’s also kind of violent, and the chosen-one narrative offers an amazing explanation: it says, everyone feels this way, there’s power in this decision you’ve made. The second is the end of school. You’ve spent time figuring out what you believe and where your boundaries are, and you’re just getting back on your feet when everything ends. And the chosen one is less good at dealing with that. I wondered if the two were entwined: do you feel less chosen the older you get? Then there are all those millions of kids – and I was certainly one of them – who would never have got the Hogwarts letter. It’s not even that I’d have been in a different house from Harry – I’d never have gotten the letter in the first place.'”
Why Star Wars is a political Force to be reckoned with - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "It was noted in 1977 that A New Hope, both in its tone and in its reception, represented a kind of wish-fulfilment after Vietnam, the rebuilding of shared moral absolutes after a visceral pasting. Two decades on, a sad adaptation to a new reality had taken place, where the living incarnation of all that is noble – the Jedi – are critically limited by the rather limp and indecisive democracy that governs them. This is inevitable, if the highest beings are aristocrats but the highest stated value is democracy. The ideas that all citizens share the dignity of being born equal, and the best among them are more equal than the others, are simply incompatible. This explains why the goodies are suddenly so complicated while the baddies’ motivation is intact and as strong as ever."
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