http://www.factsandideas.com Facts, Ideas and Logic en Some despots, in Hindustan and Persia, went further, slitting smokers’ lips or pouring molten lead down their throats. American prohibitionists claimed that smoking led to moral decay; Nazis that it was a decadent Jewish habit. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1035 2009-06-12 11:06:23 Publishers risk being viewed much like recording labels were a decade ago: greedy corporate titans who hide behind claims of high costs and creative entitlement as they resist the transition to a digital landscape. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1034 2009-05-17 12:05:28 Drugs like Ritalin and Adderall work, in part, by elevating the amount of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is something you want just enough of: too little, and you may not be as alert and motivated as you need to be; too much, and you may feel stimulated. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1033 2009-04-25 21:04:05 When it came to the nomination of the Dane Rasmussen as the next NATO secretary general, Turkey not only wanted to demonstrate its strength, but also served as a mouthpiece for Muslim anger over the Muhammad caricatures http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1032 2009-04-07 22:04:48 The publishers of “The House of Wittgenstein” compare the “novelistic richness” of its style to Thomas Mann’s first novel, “Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family,” which was published in 1901. In fact, there are more than stylistic similarities. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1031 2009-04-02 08:04:47 If a man pushes a pregnant woman and she miscarries, but is not otherwise hurt, then the offender pays only a fine to the victim's husband. This has interesting implications for how we think about abortion. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1030 2009-03-31 21:03:54 Dyson maintains that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. he blames environmentalists “lousy science” for “distracting public attention.” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1029 2009-03-28 21:03:27 In standard third-person narration, a tiny slippage often suffices to alert us to a character’s fiction-making. For instance, if I were describing the New York subway, in the third person, from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old boy, and I wrote: http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1028 2009-03-25 21:03:16 People feel guilty about hedonism right afterwards, but as time passes the guilt dissipates. At some point there’s a reversal, and what builds up is this wistful feeling of missing out on life’s pleasures. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1027 2009-03-24 09:03:07 Mumblecore movies are made by buddies, casual and serious lovers, and networks of friends, and they’re about college-educated men and women who aren’t driven by ideas or by passions or even by a desire to make their way in the world. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1026 2009-03-20 11:03:06 Tony Gilroy’s most ingenious structural gamble — the duplicity of “Duplicity” — is to make foreground and background almost perfectly reversible. It’s a sharp, sexy comedy masquerading as a twisty tale of intrigue, and vice versa. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1025 2009-03-20 11:03:56 "In ascent of money", Niall Ferguson argues, Imperial Spain amassed vast amounts of bullion from the New World, but it faded as a power while the British and Dutch empires prospered because they had sophisticated banking systems and Spain did not. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1024 2009-03-24 09:03:20 Totems of masculinity and mementos from a heroic cinematic age, are what make this unassuming film — small in scale if not in the scope of its ideas — more than just a vendetta flick or an entertainment about a crazy coot and the exotic strangers next doo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1023 2009-03-04 14:03:13 Islam affirms itself as the last and final revelation of God's word, the consummation of all the mere glimpses of the truth vouchsafed to all the foregoing faiths, available by way of the unimprovable, immaculate text of "the recitation," or Quran. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1022 2009-03-03 10:03:52 it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants, bees, birds and dolphins. And those animals may have a thing or two to teach people about collective decision-making. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1021 2009-02-15 10:02:55 Although Denis Dutton endorses the popular form of evolutionary psychology in principle, his practice is more nuanced. His discussion of the arts and of our responses to them is uniformly insightful and penetrating. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1020 2009-01-31 12:01:09 Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly. On the contrary, it has pursued a laudable goal: promoting access to information. But the class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1019 2009-01-26 09:01:58 Since the AKP assumed power in 2002, Turkish foreign policy is increasingly driven by two new factors: religion and money. Over the past year, the Islamist AKP government has hosted a series of anti-Western leadersincluding the presidents of Iran, Sudan . http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1018 2009-01-25 05:01:42 Americans watched investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street. This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired ... http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1017 2009-01-04 07:01:57 It isn’t a love story; it’s a tale about koi — a term used in Japan for a sexual relationship free of the melodramatic trappings of love, founded on camaraderie rather than romance. As the narrator explains lve is serious and intense, but koi is funny .. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1016 2009-01-04 07:01:41 Tyndale was not a charming sophisticate. He seems to have lacked social grace,and was rather bad at reading the minds of people around him. The modern term for that is autistic; he would probably have found some neater way to describe a personality that i http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1015 2008-12-20 11:12:18 In an orginal piece written for New York Review of Books, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk appears to believe that 1955 Istanbul pogrom is instigated not just by Turkish secret service but also by Britain. That's very weird. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1014 2008-12-17 03:12:44 Wallace wrote big, brainy novels that were encyclopedically packed with information and animated by arcane ideas. In nonfiction essays, he tackled a daunting range of highbrow topics, including ethics and epistemology of lobster pain. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1013 2008-12-16 03:12:50 For your own physical, psychological, and financial well-being it is crucial that you know how to identify the psychopath. Among the professions likely to attract psychopaths are law enforcement, the military, politics, and medicine. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1012 2008-12-09 07:12:33 Zizek is all bark and no bite. Robert Boynton, writing in Lingua Franca in 1998, found Zizek "bearded, disheveled, and loud ... like central casting's pick for the role of Eastern European Intellectual."Boynton was amused to see the manic, ranting ... http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1011 2008-12-07 14:12:44 There are two classic theories about the origin of jokes. One is that they come from stockbrokers, who have time on their hands between sales and a communications network to send jokes around.The other theory is that they are made up by prisoners. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1010 2008-12-07 13:12:00 Since her book “The Shock Doctrine” was published last year, Klein, now thirty-eight, has become the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago. She speaks every few days, all over. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1009 2008-12-07 05:12:27 The centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world. Younger monkeys pull the tails of older monkeys. African hunting dogs jump all over one another, much like pad-slapping, joking football. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1008 2008-12-07 03:12:11 One implication of a paper about to be published in Intelligence is that brainy people are intrinsically healthier than those less intellectually endowed. This result results has emerged from an unrelated study of the quality of men’s sperm. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1007 2008-12-07 03:12:24 The Republicans lost the battle of ideas marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1006 2008-12-07 03:12:25 Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general. A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1005 2008-11-04 07:11:41 In "Descartes's Bones", Shorto makes deft use of the centuries-­long to-and-fro over Descartes’s remains, a tale that involves three different burials, events in six countries and lingering questions, partly resolved by the author himself. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1004 2008-11-02 16:11:49 ThE evidence suggests that homosexual behaviour is partly genetic. This raises a worrying evolutionary question: how could a trait so at odds with reproductive success survive the ruthless imperatives of natural selection? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1003 2008-10-26 06:10:03 Much of Mr Obama’s rhetoric is strikingly conservative, even Reaganesque. He preaches the virtues of personal responsibility and family values, and practises them too. He talks in uplifting terms about the promise of American life. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1002 2008-10-26 01:10:08 Traders at the Mercantile Exchange buy and sell oil for future delivery, and the price serves as the reference price for oil shipments around the world. When a refinery contracts to buy crude oil,it generally agrees to pay the price on the Merc http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1001 2008-10-26 13:10:31 Prodigies like Picasso rarely engage in an of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual” in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go. But late bloomers follow an experimental approach. Their goals are imprecise. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1000 2008-10-22 04:10:55 Having a significant Starbucks presence is a pretty significant indicator of the degree of connectedness to the form of highly caffeinated, free-spending capitalism that got us into this mess. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=999 2008-10-22 02:10:45 Celebrities may serve an important social function. In industrial society, celebrities may be the only “friends” we have in common with our new neighbors and co-workers. They provide a common topic conversation between people who otherwise might nothing http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=998 2008-10-19 07:10:14 People are physically healthier in times of recession. Death rates fall, people smoke less, drink less and exercise more. Traffic fatalities go way down.Heart attacks go down. Back problems go down. People have more time to prepare healthier meals at home http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=997 2008-10-20 03:10:04 Tipping began as an aristocratic practice, a sprinkle of change for social inferiors, and it quickly spread among the upper classes of Europe. Yet even at its outset, tipping engendered feelings of anxiety and resentment. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=996 2008-10-11 08:10:30 Sex and money are now topics for documentaries, even after-dinner conversation. The last taboo, surely, is shit. The byproducts of digestion are so hard to mention that symptoms of bowel cancer are often ignored until it is too late. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=995 2008-10-11 08:10:31 Houellebecq, the novelist and ageing enfant terrible, and BHL, the leftwing philosopher, epitomise France's love-hate relationship with its bestselling literary exports. In a surprise joint venture, they have produced a book of confessions of letters. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=994 2008-10-08 06:10:57 By the last years of the 20th century, Richard Rorty was probably the best-known university-based philosopher in the United States. In recent years he has been surpassed in notoriety by the utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=993 2008-10-06 05:10:38 "Naked Airpor is an impressively illustrated, comprehensive "cultural history" of airports as buildings, from the earliest days of makeshift sheds and hangars to the vast, glassy terminals designed by architectural multinationals such as Foster + Partners http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=992 2008-10-05 14:10:51 The British betting shop, ladbrokes.com, has as the frontrunner, at 3 to 1 odds, the Italian essayist and novelist Claudio Magris, followed, at 4-1, by the Syrian poet Adonis. All of whom caused Americans to scratch their heads and say “Huh?” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=991 2008-10-05 12:10:23 The actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi’s career forms the narrative thread of Ian Buruma’s evocative novel which spans roughly 50 years of Japan’s tumultuous modern history.Buruma uses Yamaguchi’s bizarre story as a metaphor for Japan’s own shifting identity. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=990 2008-10-04 06:10:16 David Brooks tried to refine the concept, coining the term BoBo to describe an allegedly more enlightened consumer who combined the self-interest of the 80's with the liberal idealism of an earlier era, using the Y-word to denote a less enlightened group. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=989 2008-10-02 04:10:38 Murdoch’s sudden appearance reinforced the local sense that New York was falling to pieces,and being sold off for parts.Murdoch’s Post—manic,loud,prurient,shameless, unrespectable,finding entertainment in the hideous—was an appalling funhouse mirror. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=988 2008-10-01 14:10:04 Facundo Bacardi, who founded the eponymous rum company in 1862, came to Cuba from Spain as a teen-ager. By the turn of the century the distilling operation that Facundo had begun in a shed was among the brands most closely identified with Cuba. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=987 2008-10-01 05:10:10 Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil who is the subject of a fine new biography. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=986 2008-09-30 09:09:14 Galileo did not get into trouble solely because he was expressing views contrary to scripture, but because he was doing so independently, rather than as a theologian acting within the Church. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=984 2008-09-29 03:09:04 For public consumption, CUP proclaimed a ‘civic’ nationalism, open to any citizen of the state, no matter what their creed or descent. In secret conclave, on the other hand, it prepared for a more confessional or ethnic nationalism, restricted to Muslims. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=983 2008-09-28 16:09:26 During WW2,Inönü had steered Turkey in much the way Franco had done Spain, tempering political affinity and assistance to the Nazi regime with a prudent attentisme allowing for better relations with the West once it looked as if Germany would be defeated. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=982 2008-09-28 16:09:56 Google's online encyclopedia Knol diminishes community involvement, giving authors complete control over their postings. Second, it rewards authors with advertising lucre, creating a huge incentive for people to post as much content as possible. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=981 2008-09-27 02:09:20 Sushi, for instance, is everything [White People] want: foreign culture, expensive, healthy, and hated by the ‘uneducated.’ Christianity and Sarah Palin are “a little trashy” The aversion for christianity is rooted not in religious enmity but in taste. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=980 2008-09-22 11:09:29 In a talk he gives in TED, philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett draws on a similarity in the works of Jared Diamond (the author of 'Guns, Germs and Steel') and Sayyid Qutb. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=979 2008-09-22 06:09:21 Bernard-Henri Lewis takes a stand against the mindless anti-Americanism that is so prevalent among the lumpen intellectuals of Europe. In his view, the phenomenon has two highly unpleasant subtexts to it. The first is ingratitude. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=978 2008-09-22 09:09:29 M.I.T. had a head start with its software, but in short order other universities began clamoring to broadcast their lectures free. Duke, Yale and Stanford now serve as “providers” on iTunes U, which appeared in Mat to make lectures available online. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=977 2008-09-21 05:09:19 Professors are more ambivalent, and they happily share theories that what students are really evaluating is less pedagogy than whether a professor is funny, handsome or an easy grader. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=976 2008-09-20 14:09:23 The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means "land." The resulting acronym means "land of the pure." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=975 2008-09-17 04:09:06 When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they’ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,” said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=974 2008-09-16 02:09:48 The Muslim intellectual class has a tendency to fall prey to nearly every bad idea that comes its way, from fascism to socialism to third-worldism. Partly as a result of this, the Muslim world soured on liberalism before it ever really tasted it. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=973 2008-09-14 05:09:29 At 43 Machiavelli desperately needed a job. Poor and unemployed he retreated from the city to live on the family farm. He was sadly out of his element, catching birds and playing cards; his worldly friends sent mocking regards to the chickens. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=972 2008-09-10 14:09:57 Social scientists have a name for incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does out of the corner of the eye. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=971 2008-09-08 10:09:33 As a general rule,the more unequal a place is,the more Democratic;the more equal,the more Republican.The gap between rich and poor in DC is nearly twice as great as in strongly Republican Charlotte.But this isn't a case of shanties against the mansions. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=970 2008-09-06 16:09:19 McCain projects the blokeish persona of a man who used to drink too much, crash planes and chase women. He has a stock of awful jokes, which he repeats so often that his staff have the punchlines printed on T-shirts. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=969 2008-09-02 12:09:18 While some people on their deathbeds dutifully rage against the dying of the light, Barnes prefers those who simply remain true to themselves, who depart this life with, say, a gesture of quiet courtliness. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=968 2008-09-02 11:09:11 Brits are the ones who are carousing, brawling and getting violently sick. They are the ones crowding into health clinics seeking morning-after pills and help for sexually transmitted diseases.They are the ones who seem to have one vacation plan:drinking. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=967 2008-08-27 01:08:23 Mamma Mia is more like a theatrical kebab, onto which she skewered as many Abba songs as humanly possible: a clever move, given that half the people in the Western world have the Abba sound stuck itchily in their ears, whether they like it or not. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=966 2008-08-12 04:08:27 Researchers argue about why certain cultures have become more individualistic than others.Some say that Western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece,with its emphasis on individual heroism,while other cultures draw on more on tribal philosophies http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=965 2008-08-12 04:08:45 Obama is strikingly self-obsessed even by the standards of politicians. He has already written two autobiographies. But there are worrying signs, for the Democrats, that Obama fatigue is beginning to set in. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=964 2008-08-11 05:08:56 One explanation is that the defecting spouses of high earners are getting out before the crunch reduces the potential for lucrative settlements. As the City boom turns to bust, redundancies are becoming commonplace and hefty bonuses a distant dream. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=963 2008-07-26 10:07:04 Many people who knew Obama then remember him for his cockiness. He had good reason to be self-assured. A number of his accomplishments had been accompanied by adoring press coverage. He was the president of the Harvard Law Review. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=962 2008-07-26 04:07:39 Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=961 2008-07-25 05:07:40 Two psychologists from Berkeley California argue that whether a woman smiles in her photo can predict "favorable outcomes in marriage and personal well-being up to 30 years later." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=960 2008-07-23 03:07:23 The article cites McCain working close with Democrats. He calls his own party's leaders corrupt. He jokingly refers to his younger political self "freshman right-wing Nazi." Conservatives, as a rule, do not liken conservatism to national socialism. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=959 2008-07-26 04:07:40 The Shock Doctrine has a single, uncomplicated explanation for everything that ails us. It identifies the fundamental driving force of the last three decades to be the worldwide spread of free-market absolutism as it was formulated by Milton Friedman. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=958 2008-07-23 01:07:29 On the 4th of July, a dog named Dixie was sitting in the backyard of her owners. Around dusk, the sky above her exploded with the flashes and percussive booms of fireworks. Whatever happened, Dixie hasn’t been the same since. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=957 2008-07-22 12:07:38 The cliché is that AKP represents the "real Turks" fighting off the "secular elites"; the pious, popular masses versus an irreligious intelligentsia. But this is hardly the case. Both Turkeys in this power struggle are religious, both are wealthy. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=956 2008-07-20 03:07:40 See that girl! Watch that scene! If you change your mind,I’m the first in line. Mamma Mia,here I go again. You may have spent the last 30 years struggling to get lines like those out of your head and wondering what they were doing there in the first place http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=955 2008-07-19 00:07:22 In a recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior Christopher Wilson, a neurobiologist at Cornell University, suggests that male-genital mutilations are actually intended to prevent younger men from fathering children with older men’s wives. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=954 2008-06-30 10:06:13 The idea of the West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots in European soil. Defining it in historical terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-Enlightenment, to be sure. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=953 2008-06-29 09:06:30 Bolívar led military campaigns to free large parts of South America from Spanish rule, and in 1819 he helped create a vast nation called Gran Colombia, which encompassed the present-day republics of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=952 2008-06-22 11:06:25 To this end, he fakes his own death in a confrontation with his Palestinian nemesis, the Phantom (John Turturro), and smuggles himself to New York in a dog carrier, taking his co-travelers' names as his own, "Scrappy Coco." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=951 2008-06-08 06:06:10 On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion. Video-stream or download the video of their conversation http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=950 2008-06-07 17:06:27 The philosophy that appealed to Jimmy Wales--founder of Wikipedia--was Objectivism, a strand of thinking associated with the author Ayn Rand. “It colours everything I do and think,” he says. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=949 2008-06-07 15:06:38 For string theory to make mathematical sense the world must have nine spatial dimensions. Why don’t we notice the six extra dimensions? Because, according to string theory, they are curled up into some microgeometry that makes them invisible. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=948 2008-06-06 06:06:26 Scott Soames describes the development of the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. His essay appears in "The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy" edited by Cheryl Misak. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=947 2008-06-06 05:06:48 Erdogan's disdain for press independence rivals the Kremlin's. He has sued more journalists than any predecessor, and has leaned on the owners of media outlets to rein in editors. Those who do not abide the prime minister's wishes face consequences. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=946 2008-06-06 12:06:07 The McCain myth, as we know, is built on the foundation of his five and a half years of captivity in Hoa Lo Prison, aka the "Hanoi Hilton." He was flying a bombing raid in October 1967; his plane was shot down, he parachuted into the middle of a lake. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=945 2008-06-05 11:06:08 Democratic iterations’ are linguistic, legal, cultural and political repetitions-in-transformation, invocations which are also revocations. They not only change established understandings but also transform what passes as the valid. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=944 2008-06-05 11:06:51 Despite some eerie parallels between the position of the United States today and that of the British Empire a century ago, there are key differences. Britain's decline was driven by bad economics. The United States has the strength and dynamism to lead. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=943 2008-06-05 10:06:17 Creation almost begins with a curse, God’s determination that women will give birth in pain as a result of Eve’s disobedience.The earth is then quickly condemned to the Flood, because God is unhappy with his sinful creation, and wants to start over again. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=942 2008-06-02 14:06:02 If you can get your news from Google and your opinions from the latest, hottest, angriest blog? But Human Smoke might be a harbinger of what is to come in other spheres: Baker, after all, is the historians' equivalent of the smug bloggers. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=941 2008-05-22 10:05:50 Application of the hair of the dog may sound like nothing more than a way of getting yourself drunk enough so that you don’t notice you have a hangover, but the biochemistry is probably more complicated than that. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=940 2008-05-21 15:05:30 A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens. Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at their social mores. This is very much in America's contributions to civilization. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=939 2008-05-16 16:05:46 As an executive with one of Istanbul's largest firms said, "Turkey's islamist party in power (AKP) is like a cancer. You feel fine, but then one day you start coughing blood. By the time you realize there's a problem, it's too far-gone." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=938 2008-05-11 08:05:14 We catch up with Tony Stark (Iron Man) in dusty Afghanistan, where he is enjoying a Scotch on the rocks in the back of an armored American military vehicle. Tony is a media celebrity, a former M.I.T. whiz kid. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=937 2008-05-02 14:05:53 Like Rawls, Nozick sought to impose an abstract vision of justice on political life, relegating considerations of feasibility to be resolved by others, in the spirit of Kant’s dictum, “let justice triumph, even if the world perishes by it.” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=936 2008-05-01 18:05:44 Throughout his scholarly life, Benny Morris has explored the thorny question of whether or not Ben-Gurion and his colleagues explicitly endorsed a policy of “transferring”—exiling—the Arab population from Israel. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=935 2008-04-28 19:04:53 Iran is a rising diplomatic force with strengthening links in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. US attempts to isolate Iran have failed as Iran uses oil and gas, and divisions between neighbours, t o increase its influence. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=934 2008-04-28 10:04:55 Football is heavily rule-bound. There’s an elaborate rulebook that sharply limits what players can and can’t do (down to where they have to stand on the field), and its dictates are followed with great care. Soccer is a more priciples-based sport. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=933 2008-04-25 03:04:48 For all the detours and inaccurracies, the first half of the Histories lay a crucial foundation for the reader’s experience of the war between Persia and Greece. Herodotus’ real subject is not so much the improbable Greek victory as the Persian defeat. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=932 2008-04-24 17:04:18 The deeper cause of the growth of Islamism is the intellectual sclerosis of the Arab and Muslim world. The hostility of Islamic scholars to secular knowledge prevented progress and sent the Muslim world into a state of near-permanent civilization. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=931 2008-04-23 08:04:55 There are all sorts of costs associated with driving that the actual driver doesn’t pay. Such a condition is known to economists as a negative externality: the behavior of Person A damages the welfare of Person Z, but Z has no control over A’s actions. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=930 2008-04-22 17:04:45 Language affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=929 2008-04-22 17:04:44 Reading Kagan is like reading the work of a very clever Marxist: the logic is impeccable, even when the premise is wrong. Kagan holds that liberals are dreamers who believe that nations will behave decently once they are part of a rational world order. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=928 2008-04-16 14:04:50 Alexander Bird writes on the fundamental contributions of Saul Kripke with regard to metaphysics, semantics, philosophy of language, theory of reference, singular terms and names, rules and scepticism. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=927 2008-04-05 17:04:04 Making Globalization Work is the third of Joseph Stiglitz's popular, and populist, books. Like Jeffrey Sachs, Stiglitz is an economist turned preacher, one of a new breed of secular evangelists produced by the fall of communism. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=926 2008-04-01 16:04:40 Chic French women prefer to peel and polish rather than paint their faces. Too much makeup, they say, makes a woman seem older, or worse, “vulgaire.” “The most beautiful makeup is passion,” Yves Saint Laurent once said. “But cosmetics are easier to buy." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=925 2008-04-01 06:04:28 Americans have a prejudice in favor of lone wolves. Moral superiority, we like to think, belongs to the person who stands alone. And that's a crap. Until recently, social science went along with this idea. Lab-based research furnished slam-dunk evidence. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=924 2008-04-01 06:04:29 Nature, the science journal, published a report suggesting that drink was, from a biological point of view, engrained among the British. There are historical reasons for that. Fermented drinks contained none of the bugs that could be found in water. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=923 2008-04-01 06:04:39 Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=922 2008-03-26 18:03:44 Islamism is a modern philosophy, not just a heap of medieval prejudices. In its sundry versions, it draws on local and religious roots, just as it claims to do. But it also draws on totalitarian inspirations from 20th-century Europe. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=921 2008-03-23 05:03:11 Nussbaum tells the ancient Greek story in “Liberty of Conscience,” her grand and penetrating discourse on religion and American law, to illustrate how an unbending state can impose a “tragic burden” on a member of a religious minority. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=920 2008-03-23 04:03:19 The novelist Nicholson Baker’s customary style in books like “The Mezzanine” and “Room Temperature” is to observe the world in slow, painstaking detail, relishing the tiny moment, enjoying the aside for the sake of accuracy. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=919 2008-03-23 04:03:40 The categorical imperative means something different, but it does sound like the right term for the self-protective psychological urge that drove Peter Mark Roget creator of the Thesaurus, to classify and categorize all manner of things over his lifetime http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=918 2008-03-21 04:03:24 if London these days is marked by innovation, Paris favours preservation. While London seems to be stressing its desire for change with its new architectural projects, the City of Light appears more concerned with scrubbing up what it already has. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=917 2008-03-21 04:03:59 The indisputably gorgeous Naomi Watts spends a great deal of time in just bra and panties, the poster,featuring her beautiful, tear-stained face, recalls nothing so much as a '70s-era blood-and-boobs exploitation flick. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=916 2008-03-21 04:03:13 Steve Jobs has successfully revived Apple through Mac computers, iPod MP3 players and the iPhone. He has done so by breakþing all the rules of recent management theory and Silicon Valley Culture, both of which rest on transparency and participation. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=915 2008-03-19 14:03:17 Zangwill unifies sociological, cognitive and Kantian explanations of aesthetic experience. Kant regards taste as arising from the faculties of cognition, which can be integrated with theories of cognition and social theories of taste. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=914 2008-03-15 16:03:18 The most recent edition of Husserl2s great early work which has strong influenced European philosophy ever since,and which has been taken up by Analytic philosophers. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=913 2008-03-16 16:03:54 The bill Spitzer incurred-$4,300-is not an altogether alarming sum of money in the high-end sex market. Spitzer got a bargain—and that may have been his downfall. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=912 2008-03-13 13:03:29 In a recent commentary in the journal Nature, two Cambridge University researchers reported that about a dozen of their colleagues had admitted to regular use of prescription drugs like Adderall, a stimulant, and Provigil, which promotes wakefulness. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=911 2008-03-13 13:03:05 To measure a subject's worthiness for inclusion (or “notability”, in the jargon of Wikipedians), all kinds of rules have been devised. So an article in an international journal counts more than a mention in a local newspaper. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=910 2008-03-13 13:03:43 Soames the defends reality of propositions, the bears of truth, in relation to facts. It is propositions that can be true or false, that can be believed or not believed, not the facts. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=909 2008-03-08 14:03:14 Husserlreturns to Descartes in order to present his own transcendental Phenomenology. He explains this as the need to repeat Descartes' gesture of moving inwards in order to construct philosophy in a pure and systematc way, from nothing. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=908 2008-03-08 12:03:57 Homeownership impedes the economy’s readjustment by tying people down. From a social point of view, it’s beneficial that homeownership encourages commitment to a given town or city. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=907 2008-03-04 02:03:00 Wittgenstein once averred that “there can never be surprises in logic.” But Gödel’s incompleteness theorems did come as a surprise. What could it mean to say that a mathematical proposition was true if there was no possibility of proving it? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=906 2008-03-02 10:03:28 Friedrich Engels declared that the potato was the equal of iron for its “historically revolutionary role”. Potato's history is well worth celebrating because it is intertwined with economic development, trade liberalisation and globalization. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=904 2008-03-01 15:03:22 In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," and you'll have knowledge you didn't have before. It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=903 2008-03-01 12:03:45 William Buckley rose to prominence with a generation of talented writers fascinated by political themes, people with names like Mailer, Capote, Vidal, Styron and Baldwin. Like the others, he was a magnet for controversy. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=902 2008-02-28 09:02:05 Vol 20issue 1 of Utilitas is available in free access for articles in Html and pdf formats. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=901 2008-02-27 11:02:13 Despite accusations of being light weight, Obama Barack has gathered a team of advisers committed to innovative approaches to public policy, using new behavioural approaches to the social sciences. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=900 2008-02-27 11:02:12 According to Stanislas Dehaene, humans have an inbuilt “number sense” capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems start when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=899 2008-02-25 17:02:55 Obama is the candidate of the new--a "new generation," a "new leadership," a "new kind of politics," to borrow phrases he has used. But, in emphasizing newness, Obama is actually voicing a very old theme. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=898 2008-02-25 10:02:04 The status of art in the modern era, considers Hegel’s claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation, that it is no longer through art that Spirit principally comes to knowledge of itself, but not the death of art, rather art as self-annullment. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=897 2008-02-20 11:02:17 When a David Gelernter writes a book about the United States as a great religion or a Victor Davis Hanson states in an oddly Marxian vein that history has already proven that America has offered mankind its “last and greatest hope,” one may disagree. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=896 2008-02-19 21:02:19 Diab looks at the rights and wrongs of the integration of immigrants and minorities in Germany and Turkey following a speech by the Turkish Prime Minister to Turks in Germany http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=894 2008-02-19 09:02:26 The Coen brothers' form a conspiracy of industrious, secretive and amused. Early in their careers, they gave detailed interviews, but in recent years they have discussed only specific and relatively trivial matters concerning their movies. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=893 2008-02-18 10:02:22 Anton Chigurh is a peculiar hitman. He threatens to kill a man’s wife if the man doesn’t tell him what he needs to know – and then killing her even after the man is dead because he treats his threat as a kind of promise to himself. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=892 2008-02-19 19:02:17 “There Will Be Blood” exhibits much the same qualities as Mr. Anderson’s previous work — every shot seems exactly right — but its narrative form is more classical and less weighted down by the pressures of self-aware auteurism. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=891 2008-02-18 08:02:04 Scientists who study play, in animals and humans alike, are developing a consensus view that play is something more than a way for restless kids to work off steam; more than a way for chubby kids to burn off calories; more than a frivolous luxury. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=890 2008-02-17 12:02:36 Crank? Crackpot? Charlatan? Maybe all three. Yet the maharishi was generally benign. He did not use his money for sinister ends. He neither drank, nor smoked, nor took drugs. Indeed, he is credited with weaning the Beatles off dope (for a while). http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=889 2008-02-17 12:02:05 The A.K.P. has been kinder to the Kurds than any of the other major parties, but that isn’t saying much. The party’s commitment to minority rights in general has been spotty and varies significantly from one party leader to another. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=888 2008-02-17 12:02:13 The debate began with Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam, his 2006 book about the background and implications of the daylight butchery of Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo Van Gogh by an Islamic extremist named Mohammed Bouyeri. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=887 2008-02-17 12:02:57 The American system of higher education, long the envy of the world, is becoming an important export as more universities take their programs overseas. In a kind of educational gold rush, American universities are competing to set up outposts. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=886 2008-02-10 15:02:57 The ancient Jewish horror of barefacedness a merely cultural phenomenon; it was intimately connected with a religious commandment. “Do not cut the edges of your bear.,” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=885 2008-02-09 09:02:15 Argues that contemporary existence is marked by a denial of experience. Through explorations of the work of Kant, Hegel and Husserl, Agamben addresses the question of language and experience. His chapter on childhood and games looks at the pre-lingusitic. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=884 2008-02-08 13:02:42 In the hunt for a distinctive European identity, consider toy brands, such as Denmark's Lego or Germany's Playmobil. In their designs, business models and philosophies, they offer a striking snapshot of European aspirations, anxieties and foibles. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=883 2008-02-06 20:02:03 In this draft chapter Scanlon looks at what it is to blame someone. He defines blame as what happens when a relationship is impaired and criticises accounts of blame based on negative assessment of character, or on punishment. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=882 2008-01-25 06:01:58 Huntington had written that the Turks —rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels—would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Ataturk had bequeathed his country. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=881 2008-01-24 10:01:15 When it comes to new waves, the critics who announce (or invent) them have more of an investment than artists, who understandably resist the notion that their individuality might be assimilated into some larger tendency. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=880 2008-01-23 19:01:33 In the opening shot of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” we see a table littered with crockery, a fishtank, and an ashtray. A hand reaches in from the left and taps the ash from a cigarette; only then do we pull back and discover to whom the hand belongs. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=879 2008-01-24 09:01:44 Sarkozy is so vehement about his love that something seems weird about it. He wants people to think about his sex life, in the way that Bill Clinton didn’t want people thinking about his. The Sarkozy moment is more like Tom Cruise pounding Oprah’s sofa http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=878 2008-01-23 09:01:25 Foucault looks at the development from desire as the expression of power in antiquity, to the ascetic denial of sexuality originally associated with the inferiority of the sexual object. The health of the soul is connected with asceticism. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=877 2008-01-25 15:01:37 Foucault looks at attitudes to sexuality in Antiquity with regard to how the self was created and understood. Ideas about sex were tied up with ideas of the power of mature men over social inferiors and the right kind of self to have power. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=876 2008-01-25 15:01:50 Foucault's investigation of sexuality since the Nineteenth Century. He looks at how the moralistic discourse of the time, and its apparent repressiveness, named the objects of psychoanalysis and other contemporary discourses of sexuality. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=875 2008-01-19 21:01:26 Foucault investigates changing ways of categorising madness. He identifies a period of confinement where madness is hidden in institutions in a triumph of Reason over non-Reason. This act impovrishes by assuming a differention which madness questions. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=874 2008-01-19 17:01:35 Foucault's lectures at the College de France 1977-1978. Foucault develops ideas about 'biopower' and 'governmentality' referring to Early Modern Europe. The time when the state is increasingly concerned with population as necessary to security. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=873 2008-01-19 17:01:18 The Boltzmann brain problem arises from a string of logical conclusions that all spring from another deep and old question, namely why time seems to go in only one direction. Why can’t you unscramble an egg? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=872 2008-01-17 04:01:47 Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher from Berkeley, studies professional ethicists behavior in his research. His research examines the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=871 2008-01-16 10:01:09 Alfred Döblin's great novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, is pretty much untranslatable. Much of it is written in the working-class argot of pre-war Berlin. A translator can ignore this, of course, and use plain English, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=870 2008-01-14 03:01:07 Gary Wolf discusses how a psychologist and philosopher tried to settle their arguments about the mind through experimenting on one woman. Salon.com reporting on Hulbert and Schwitzgebel's book 'Describing Inner Experience'(pictured) http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=869 2008-01-13 23:01:43 In The Guardian, Tom Hodgkinson attacks Facebook as the creation and instrument of hardcore rightwingers who call themselves Libertarians but who are creating a Neo-Conservative Big Brother society. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=868 2008-01-13 23:01:44 There’s no escaping the fact: this is a very grim film. But it’s also a serious, terrifically made one that couldn’t be more sensitive to the individual and political ramifications of its horrific theme: http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=867 2008-01-13 10:01:14 Elections demand that candidates differentiate themselves, yet various plausible front-runners’ positions on Iraq are not all that far apart. There are subtle differences regarding the completeness and timing of withdrawal: John Edwards, for instance, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=866 2008-01-13 10:01:45 The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=865 2008-01-13 10:01:05 In 'Foreign Policy', Stefan Theil (pictured)presents the results of research into economics education in Europe, and finds that particularly in France and Germany there is a strong bias against risk taking, entrepreneurs, and globalisation. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=864 2008-01-12 09:01:46 The New York Times has reported on the feud between former friends Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn. A very negative review by McGinn of a book by Honderich (pictured)has led to a battle between the two men extensively discussed by philosophers on the net. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=863 2008-01-12 09:01:42 Scientology, the religion that grew out of L. Ron Hubbard’s popular self-help manual “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,” incorporates aspects of Eastern philosophy, management theory, and science fiction—a genre in which Hubbard was prolific http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=862 2008-01-10 06:01:35 In "Suicide of Reason", Harris argues that the Muslim world, since it is governed by the law of the jungle, makes group survival paramount. This explains in part the willingness of Muslims to become martyrs for the larger community, the umma- http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=861 2008-01-07 02:01:39 The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of a strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=860 2008-01-06 17:01:09 Arranged marriages can be a messy business. Designed principally as a means of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations or transcending clandestine love affairs, they often don’t work. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=859 2008-01-07 02:01:26 It is an irony of history that the country that Hitler wanted to make judenrein now has the fastest-growing Jewish community in western Europe. Before the Nazis came to power, about 600,000 Jews lived in Germany. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=858 2008-01-06 16:01:10 The legend cultivated by Pakistani politicians like Benazir Bhutto and her principal civilian rival, Nawaz Sharif, cast the generals as the main villains in stifling democracy, emerging from their barracks to grab power out of Napoleonic ambition http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=857 2008-01-06 16:01:59 Schrader likes his decadence ripe and toxic, seeping through the gold-trimmed furniture and into the water supply. Nothing in Schrader’s film “The Walker” can quite match its delicious opening scene of sniping repartee over canasta among three Washington http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=856 2008-01-04 06:01:58 South Asia expert William Dalrymple on the Pakistani Princess Benazir Bhutto. She was born to rule. She had an attractive personality,but in power she was part of the system of clientalism, corruption, authoritarianism which has ruined Pakistan democracy http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=855 2007-12-30 12:12:08 At the beginnings of their lives all pygmy populations follow the same growth curves as taller populations. This demonstrates that pygmyism is not a result of early malnutrition, as one would expect. At the age of about 12, however, pygmies stop growing. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=854 2007-12-29 07:12:22 The most striking element of the overall picture continues to be the extraordinary turnaround in nearly every area apart from the family and marriage rates.Culture itself exhibits an ebb and flow as surely as economies pass through cycles of ups and down. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=853 2007-12-25 16:12:35 Art Carden comments on economic and oral arguments in defense of Scrooge, on the website of the Mises Institute, from a libertarian perspective. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=852 2007-12-25 14:12:57 The “Ode to Joy” is more than just a universally popular piece of classical music that has become something of a cliché during the holiday season. It has also been, for more than a century, what literary theorists call an “empty signifier” — a symbol that http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=851 2007-12-25 16:12:13 Reading Ike's account of his life, you might suppose that things had come a little too easy. Sex, for example. At the age of 6, he was involved with Miss Boozie. “In those days they didn't call it abuse,” says Ike later, "they called it fun!” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=850 2007-12-23 07:12:35 How do we understand and engage with the purposeful, emotional and mental activities of other people and how does this knowledge develop? What can recent work on mirror neurons in monkeys and human beings teach us about how the brain supports social under http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=849 2007-12-25 16:12:49 Like René Descartes,an excerpt from whose Discourse on Method had served in lieu of a preface to the first edition of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, a book that is prototypical for truth Beyond Good and Evil and on the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=848 2007-12-25 15:12:16 This conference promises to be unusual for me. If we think of philosophers who emphasize reference, representation, fact, truth, truth-makers, and ontology as conservatives, and therefore on the Right, and we think of those who talk of expression, discour http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=847 2007-12-19 15:12:18 Body wash has taken over, perfuming the armpits of most men; if you use body wash in an apartment complex, women in the floors below you will want to sleep with you so much that they will pole-dance on your drainage pipes. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=846 2007-12-15 07:12:45 American commentators and politicians who think he is a French version of Reagan, are fooling themselves. He is a French politician, wholly French in experience and formation, brought up to believe in central state power and responsibility, who does thing http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=845 2007-12-12 08:12:36 Even before Sunday's stunning defeat of President Hugo Chavez's constitutional reform package in Venezuela, it was clear that his rule had reached a turning point. Win or lose, Venezuela's politics had already changed in fundamental ways. The tired narrat http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=844 2007-12-11 11:12:11 Clark’s hypothesis raises a troubling question about the future, albeit one he doesn’t mention. If the key to economic progress in the past was the survival of the richest, what is in store now that the richest no longer outbreed everyone else? As he http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=843 2007-12-11 12:12:19 Intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world,in every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=842 2007-12-10 16:12:16 The title of this book is rather misleading. “Birth of neoliberal governmentality”, or something like that, would have been more faithful to its contents. In Foucault’s vocabulary, “biopolitics” is the “rationalisation” of “governmentality” (p. 261): it http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=841 2007-12-10 12:12:16 Frank Lucas is a cool guy, always shrewd enough to put a coaster under the drinks and leave no marks behind. Grinning broadly between fits of rage, he takes the overt menace out of such lines as “I’m a busy man, I got no time to be going to anyone’s fune http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=840 2007-12-10 07:12:45 The philosophy of wine, all like Hume great champions of self-improvement, address themselves to questions of subjectivity and taste, quantifiability and pleasure, perception and its objects, the role of knowledge and judgement in perceptual discernment, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=839 2007-12-10 06:12:46 The book’s argument continues through issues of religion and dignity. It touches upon whether women have a right to abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy, whether the constitution should be read as requiring permission for physician-assisted su http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=838 2007-12-10 06:12:41 Researchers who study conflict say that people who are highly emotionally reactive, for instance, or rigid or driven by narcissism, are the most likely to feud without retreat. People who internalize resentment, holding onto it indefinitely, are also more http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=837 2007-12-10 06:12:10 Atonement ends with a devastating twist, a piece of information that changes our sense of everything we have just read. It is convincing enough, but its neatness seems like the reappearance of the old McEwan, unwilling to let the ropes fall from his hands http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=836 2007-12-09 17:12:54 The first piece of literature we hear is a play by Briony Tallis, a 13 year old girl—fair and blue-eyed, with a touch of the mad, bad fairy in her gaze. She is writing the play in an English country house in 1935, to be performed by her three unhappy cous http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=835 2007-12-09 16:12:39 A book written in two parallel columns. The first column is largely a commentary on Hegel, the second column is largely a commentary on Jean Genet. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=834 2007-12-08 10:12:31 In Aristotelian Society, said a few years ago, “If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.” But now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problem by going out and gathering info http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=833 2007-12-08 06:12:15 Priest’s recent book is a homage to his deceased friend and collaborator Richard Sylvan (formerly Routley). Priest defends, with Sylvan, an ontological position derivative of Meinong’s they call noneism. Noneism, basically, is the view that there are no http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=832 2007-12-06 11:12:13 Google has, as they say, all the right enemies. Anytime the ALA, Microsoft, France, a trade guild, and a bunch of trial lawyers are lined up on one side of an argument, the other side is going to look extremely attractive. And there is a seductive appeal http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=831 2007-12-06 06:12:18 Why Dawkins refuses to take his ideas to its logical conclusion--to say that raising a child in a religious tradition, like other forms of child abuse, should be considered a crime punishable by the state--is a mystery, for it follows directly from http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=830 2007-12-25 16:12:14 They were the people who, three years ago, voted overwhelmingly for a peaceful resolution to the division of their island and were rewarded by being denied entry into the European Union. Now for the first time in years, thanks to a string of broken promis http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=829 2007-12-03 03:12:31 I am going to begin by saying something about the frame in which I want to place a conception of experience as taking in the world. Such an idea has obvious attractions from an epistemological point of view, and that is not irrelevant to my interest in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=828 2007-11-24 07:11:54 Our perceptually based beliefs are intelligible as manifestations of rationality. We can make sense of them by putting them in an explanatory nexus with perceptual experience. If someone has a perceptually based belief, she believes something because h http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=827 2007-11-24 07:11:33 I have urged that our perceptual relation to the world is conceptual all the way out to the world’s impacts on our receptive capacities. The idea of the conceptual that I mean to be invoking is to be understood in close connection with the idea of ratio http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=826 2007-11-24 07:11:23 Back in 1950, while a physics major at Harvard, I wandered into C.I. Lewis’s epistemology course. There, Lewis was confidently expounding the need for an indubitable Given to ground knowledge, and he was explaining where that ground was to be found. I w http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=825 2007-11-24 07:11:25 The approach to generative grammar originating with Chomsky (1957) has been enormously successful within linguistics. Seeing such success, one wonders whether a similar approach might help us understand other human domains besides language. One such dom http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=824 2007-11-21 19:11:25 No one wants foreign states, especially those which are anti-Western, acquiring Western companies. But policymakers also believe that having governments play an active role in the stock market and in the global economy might make the whole system less eff http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=823 2007-11-21 11:11:51 Professors with tenure or who are on a tenure track are now a distinct minority on the country’s campuses, as the ranks of part-time instructors and professors hired on a contract have swelled, according to federal figures analyzed by the American Associa http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=822 2007-11-21 06:11:55 Male pregnancies are more likely to miscarry in response to stress than female pregnancies are, especially during the first three months. However, that is difficult to prove. More intriguing, though, is the ultimate cause, for he thinks it might be adapti http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=821 2007-11-20 19:11:44 Like other fathers and sons, Douglas Gentile and his father have spent many hours arguing about video games. What makes them different is that Douglas, an Iowa State University assistant professor of psychology, is one of the country's top researchers on http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=820 2007-11-14 13:11:31 We describe music in terms of emotion. How should we understand this? Some say that emotion descriptions should be understood literally. Let us call those views “literalist.” By contrast “nonliteralists” deny this and say that such descriptions are t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=819 2007-11-14 13:11:05 Hungarian composer György Kurtág remembers his lifelong friend, György Ligeti, a gesamtkunstwerk. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=818 2007-11-12 15:11:18 Hegel seeks to overturn Kant’s conclusion that our knowledge is restricted, or that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. Understanding this Hegelian ambition requires distinguishing two Kantian characterizations of our epistemic l http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=817 2007-11-11 03:11:36 Hegel accords great philosophical importance to Kant’s discussions of teleology and biology in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and yet also disagrees with Kant’s central conclusions there. More specifically, Kant argues for a generally skeptical vi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=816 2007-11-11 03:11:58 In his Lectures on Russian Literature Vladimir Nabokov maintains that "the third, and worst, degree of turpitude" in literary translation, after "obvious errors" and skipping over awkward passages, is reached when a masterpiece is planished and pat http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=815 2007-11-11 02:11:50 On Simon Blackburn’s offbeat personal website, there are no buttons to click on, only paintings and portraits, including an animated one of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume with a winsome wink and a smile. At the top of the page is a phot http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=814 2007-11-15 20:11:57 He was a prolific Elizabethan playwright who wrote the biggest hit of Shakespeare’s day, but the name of Sir Thomas Middleton has been eclipsed for centuries by his contemporary. Now new computer-assisted research concludes that hundreds of lines in Sh http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=813 2007-11-10 06:11:23 Superbad--a horrifyingly foul-mouthed, shockingly hilarious, and surprisingly moving new teen comedy that will probably be the best-known and most fondly remembered Hollywood picture of 2007 a quarter-century from now--is set on a Friday two weeks before http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=812 2007-12-10 07:12:54 Steven Pinker takes on violence. We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we've come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=811 2007-11-08 13:11:31 The traditional detective story begins with the body and centers on the detective’s search for the culprit. Leads are pursued. A net is cast, widening to encompass a bewilderingly diverse pool of suspects: the butler, the spurned lover, the embittered nep http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=810 2007-11-07 14:11:19 This is a period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics. It is a romance, set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong; and there’s little left to the imagination other than the inspiration for Mr. Lee’s newfound flirtation with kink http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=809 2007-11-03 14:11:09 The British philosopher Antony Flew was one of the West’s most influential atheists. Then came news — from conservative Christians — that he had recanted. But his change of heart may not be what it seems. Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=808 2007-11-03 14:11:33 The greatest of the ancient collections, the Library of Alexandria, had, in its ambitions and its methods, a good deal in common with Google’s book projects. Like Google, the library developed an efficient procedure for capturing and reproducing texts. Wh http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=807 2007-11-03 09:11:58 This essay seeks to give an overview of the development, central themes and methods, and main claims of Jürgen Habermas’s thought over the course of his career. Given its incredibly wide thematic range, its pervasive influence in both public and academ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=806 2007-11-02 14:11:36 Michael Clayton is a film about ethics and American decency in which George Clooney, the ultimate playboy of the West, raises the sword in the name of truth and justice and good. Well, someone’s got to do it. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=805 2007-11-02 14:11:28 President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, not usually a reliable authority on current affairs, got it right in an open letter to George Bush: “Whether we like it or not,” he wrote, “the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty.” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=804 2007-11-02 14:11:37 In this view the truth of Islam was vindicated by actual events, through Islam's historical achievement in creating what would become a great world civilization.According to this argument, Islam overcame the enemies of truth by divinely assisted battles a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=803 2007-11-01 08:11:13 The best-selling French intellectual--Pierre Bayard--talks about why reading is like falling in love, why school makes you hate literature and why Proust was made to be skimmed. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=802 2007-10-29 07:10:32 Far from ‘unfilmable’, as some have described it, Ian McEwan’s book offers real opportunities for a filmmaker to thread the perils of storytelling into an epic narrative that bursts out of the attractive claustrophobia of a rarefied world and onto the rav http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=801 2007-10-29 03:10:48 The prospect of an attack on northern Iraq reveals a hollow global consensus on intervention - and a European identity crisis. Recent days have seen Dick Cheney and Tony Blair point belligerent fingers at Tehran, but both spoke in the slipstream of Berna http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=800 2007-10-23 10:10:29 Osama's crew are completely ridiculous figures--tin-legged zealots, amputeed mullahs, they’re all in bits. Osama is a very stupid man. But he did at least have the wit to stay in one piece.’ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=799 2007-10-23 02:10:11 1. The 19th century is often thought – with justice – to be the age of individualism. Yet it was also the great age of projects to reintegrate the individual and society. In metaphysics and methodology various schools of philosophy claimed that the thou http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=798 2007-10-19 15:10:19 Things invariably appear more important on the Internet than they are in the real world. Classical music has experienced waves of technological euphoria in the past: the Edison cylinder, radio, the LP, and the CD were all hailed as redeeming godsends for http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=797 2007-10-16 12:10:43 The history of American economic innovation in the twentieth century is really a history of clusters—think of movies in Hollywood, cars in Detroit, and technology in Silicon Valley. The traditional explanation is that the costs of being near your competit http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=796 2007-10-16 11:10:50 Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings Jerry Fodor. Die Meistersinger is, by Wagner’s standards, quite a cheerful opera. The action turns on comedy’s staple, the marriage plot: get the hero and the heroine safely and truly wed with at least a presumption of happine http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=794 2007-10-14 13:10:07 The theory is based on the idea that in evolutionary terms it benefits women to disguise when they are fertile so that their menfolk will stick around all the time. Otherwise, the theory goes, a man might go hunting for alternative mating opportunities at http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=792 2007-10-14 05:10:15 The public radio gig, the references to Emily Dickinson, the directing credit for Neil Jordan, all of this produces a patina of refinement and seriousness. But don’t be fooled. “The Brave One,” is just as crude and ugly as you want it http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=790 2007-10-10 03:10:15 Roth has sometimes resembled a man standing on a corner wearing a huge sandwich board bearing the words, in irritatingly hectoring capitals, “WE ARE ONLY HUMAN". The danger in Roth’s work has always been a slightly sentimental didacticism; an example is http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=789 2007-10-08 10:10:23 In Saul Bellow’s first post-Nobel novel, “The Dean’s December,” mortal fear centered on the colon. In Roth’s “Exit Ghost,” it centers on the prostate, or anyway on where the prostate used to be. The bearer of the wound can reach no accommodation with his http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=788 2007-10-08 10:10:07 The historical root of swearing in English and many other languages is, oddly enough, religion. We see this in the Third Commandment, in the popularity of hell, damn, God, and Jesus Christ as expletives, and in many of the terms for taboo language itself: http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=787 2007-10-08 09:10:47 What would Lacan have said! What wouldn't he have said? This is not a question, it is an exclamation: to get my voice right, to find the appropriate tone,before beginning to try out this idiomatic conjunction of negation, denial http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=786 2007-10-07 19:10:34 The heart of the English objection to Ameican squirrels comes down to this: they outcompete the native squirrels. They are simply better at the job of being squirrels. Britain’s taste for unfettered competition has always been fitful, and how much it tipp http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=785 2007-10-06 12:10:38 Kasparov speaks frequently to two sorts of audiences in the West: business groups, which seem to see him as another variety of an American crop—the executive coach—and conservative political groups. He is John Naisbitt with a queen’s-gambit twist. His con http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=784 2007-10-04 08:10:15 It is not usual to think of Fichte as a logician, nor indeed to think of him as leaving a legacy that shaped the subsequent history of symbolic logic. But I argue here that there is such a legacy, and that Fichte formulated an agenda in formal logic tha http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=783 2007-09-26 12:09:27 The reason why primates are intelligent, according to Dr Humphrey, is that they generally live in groups. And, just as group living promotes intelligence, so intelligence allows larger groups to function, providing a spur for the evolution of yet more int http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=782 2007-09-23 05:09:51 “Funny Games” occupies a unique place in Haneke’s body of work, not least because of his decision to shoot it twice. The director Ron Howard recently acquired the rights to Haneke’s “Caché” — but Haneke’s decision to remake his own film surprised fans an http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=781 2007-09-22 11:09:29 The costliest place in the world to get high is Japan, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime's annual World Drug Report. The street price of a gram of cannabis weed was $58.30 in 2005, over twice as much as in the next most expensive n http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=780 2007-09-22 11:09:46 If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=779 2007-09-21 03:09:22 As a Slovene, I have always been attentive to those few places in his writings and letters in which Freud mentions a Slovene or Slovenia; since Slovenia was part of the Austrian Empire in his time, it is surprising that these mentions are so rare. Apart f http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=778 2007-09-20 16:09:41 The key to Podhoretz's politics seems to me to lie right there: the longing for power, for toughness, for the Shtarker who doesn't give a damn about anyone or anything, and hatred of the contemptible, cowardly liberals with their pandering ways and their http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=777 2007-09-17 17:09:49 Can there be something in life that has power over us which little by little causes us to forget all that is good? And can this ever happen to anyone who has heard the call of eternity quite clearly and strongly? If this can ever be, then one must look http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=776 2007-09-09 08:09:47 Joseph Epstein, in his new biography of Tocqueville, wryly asks what the great Frenchman himself would have made of "le phénomène de Tocqueville." For as Epstein points out, it is impossible nowadays to think "about America, about democracy, about liberty http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=775 2007-09-05 12:09:46 WHEN Slavoj Žižek’s work first struck the outer crust of the Anglo-American academy, it made a significant dent. As the debris was cleared, it became apparent that something wholly unexpected had been going on in Slovenian for quite a while, and http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=774 2007-09-04 14:09:17 How essential is the complex emotion of guilt to morality? Can we define moral standards, in contrast with other sorts of standards, as those standards that it is appropriate to feel guilt for violating? Is it essential to being a moral person that one http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=773 2007-09-03 11:09:10 The best way to understand both Mr Putin's ascent into the Kremlin and his rule since is to see them as the remarkable recovery of the culture, mentality and view of the world of the old KGB. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=772 2007-08-27 21:08:55 The source of the confusion is the mistaken notion that the categories “religious” and “secular” are strictly binary, like an on-off switch. It’s true that some things are inherently religious, like a prayer or a church or a Torah scroll. (It would be imp http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=771 2007-08-27 21:08:16 It was “the most generous act of any people, anytime, anywhere, to another people,” its chief administrator declared. It was “among the most noble experiences in human affairs,” its representative in Europe said. It was “the most staggering and portentous http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=770 2007-08-23 09:08:24 The rich tended to have more children who survived than their poorer compatriots and this led to a kind of downward mobility as sons of merchants became small traders, sons of traders became craftsmen and so on http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=769 2007-08-22 21:08:24 There is something unseemly about watching the avatars of free-market capitalism rely on the government to pay for their bad bets. And there is something scary about contemplating the even bigger bets they’ll make in the future if they know that the Fed i http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=768 2007-08-22 21:08:03 In June 2004, I went door to door in a white, working- class neighborhood of Martinsburg, West Virginia, a small blue-collar town in decline. There, I found voters disillusioned with both the Iraq war and the flagging economy. But, when I returned five mo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=767 2007-08-21 05:08:34 Today's atheist polemics ignore the main insight of the anthropology of religion—that religion is not primarily about God, but about the human need for the sacred. As René Girard argues, religion is not the cause of violence, but the solution to it http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=766 2007-08-18 12:08:41 We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that can leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that that was no longer http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=765 2007-08-19 14:08:48 Download is through rar compressed file. Trial version of necessary software can be downloaded for free at http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm. Great for all zip file functions. Can be used after end of trial period. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=763 2007-08-16 13:08:50 Judith Giuliani likes to have an empty seat next to her on the campaign plane for “Baby Louis”—her Louis Vuitton handbag. Jeri Thompson is a “trophy wife” with a taste for low-cut dresses and gold-lamé wedge sandals. Ann Romney http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=762 2007-08-16 09:08:48 What Ramadan proposes is a "re-Ottomanization" of the Muslim world in which religious communities would once more enjoy a semi-autonomous existence such as they had under the sultan-caliph. The Caliphate was abolished by the Turkish National Asse http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=761 2007-08-15 22:08:46 Churchill hated the Indians: “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He had a special animus for Gandhi, describing him as a “rascal” and a “half-naked” “fakir.” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=760 2007-08-15 22:08:24 There’s nothing more exciting to an adolescent reader than an unknown genre writer who speaks to your condition and has something great about him. The Ace paperback cover promises mere thrills, and the writing provides real meaning. The combination of evi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=759 2007-08-14 10:08:24 Spencer has been tagged as a social Darwinist, but it would be more correct to think of Darwin as a biological Spencerian. Spencer was very well known as an evolutionist long before Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was published, in 1859, and people wh http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=758 2007-08-06 14:08:16 Spamhaus, an organization that tracks spammers, keeps a list of the world’ spam operators, and many of the best go by obvious pseudonyms, like the Ukrainian spammer who calls himself, variously, Alex Blood, Alexander Mosh, AlekseyB, and Alex Polyakov. For http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=757 2007-08-05 14:08:31 Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertai http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=756 2007-08-05 13:08:33 Stripped of his identity, his country and love, Bourne is now very much a man alone, existentially and otherwise. Mr. Damon makes him haunted, brooding and dark. The light seems to have gone out in his eyes, and the skin stretches so tightly across his ca http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=755 2007-08-05 13:08:42 Conspiracy theorists have a bad reputation. They are usually portrayed as paranoid, isolated, deluded people, best avoided. It is true that there are many sinister and unpleasant conspiracy theories. These are usually the ones that seek to blame all th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=754 2007-07-31 07:07:35 William James proposed an interesting way of keeping open the door to an afterlife. We know that the mind depends on the physical brain, James said. But that doesn’t mean that our brain processes actually produce our mental life, as opposed to merely tran http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=753 2007-07-30 17:07:42 What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question has still to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. The fact remains that it has by no means been answered. Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all p http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=752 2007-07-29 12:07:20 In the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault said some profound things about statements (énoncés) that concern several domains at once, even if not at the same time. I take two very vague examples. There is a moment in the Greek city when statements of a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=751 2007-07-28 17:07:56 The Ear of the Other. Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=750 2007-07-28 17:07:09 As a rising St. Louis politician in the mid-1970s, Richard Gephardt (pictured) was among a dynamic group of aldermen dubbed "The Young Turks." So perhaps it's not surprising that, 30 years later, the former Democratic minority leader of the House of Repre http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=749 2007-07-27 19:07:26 In recent years, the bonobo has found a strange niche in the popular imagination, based largely on its reputation for peacefulness and promiscuity. The Washington Post recently described the species as copulating “incessantly”; the Times claimed that the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=748 2007-07-27 16:07:05 We dream sometimes of a history of philosophy that would list only the new concepts created by a great philosopher-his most essential and creative contribution. The case of Hume could begin to be made with the following list. - He established the concept http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=747 2007-07-24 16:07:01 The Turkish parliamentary elections held on 22 July 2007 turned out to be a remarkable step towards democratic consolidation and civilian rule. The elections followed the presidential crisis of April when the military, the constitutional court, and the ma http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=746 2007-07-24 14:07:30 (The New Republic. Registration required) The year 2006 marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the Bible of twentieth-century liberalism, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. During that time Rawls's work was the touchstone for liberal http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=745 2007-07-24 14:07:18 “Hairspray” cheerfully conflates racial prejudice with fat-phobia. Tracy and her new African-American friends face equivalent forms of injustice. And hairspray does make the solidarity between them feel like an utterly natural, intuitive response to the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=744 2007-07-22 09:07:38 Warning. Download problem with Firefox Browser. Explorer and Opera browsers are fine. 13 MB file. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=743 2007-07-24 14:07:44 Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still partici http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=742 2007-07-20 01:07:24 Perhaps to be a Frenchman in the 21st century means to make a choice about certain major and seminal events, like Vichy, colonialism or May 1968. And I will look at the positions he took on these three questions and conclude that when he said that the Vic http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=741 2007-07-19 11:07:35 You know, when I ask people, 'What do you think the goals of America are today?' people don't have any idea. We don't know what we're trying to achieve. And I think that in a life or in a country you've got to have some goals." Senator Hillary Clinton, MS http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=740 2007-07-17 13:07:15 As the bestselling author of such stinging political satires as Peace Kills, Holidays in Hell, The Bachelor Home Companion, and Republican Party Reptile (notable for its advice that “anything that makes your mother cry is fun”), PJ O’Rourke, the American http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=739 2007-07-17 13:07:12 The fate of a book or a movie, the argument goes, is determined by too many factors to be predictable—advertising, reviews, word of mouth, luck, and, in the case of big hits, a simple desire to see what all the fuss is about. De Vany says that the box-off http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=738 2007-07-16 03:07:55 Digital technology has also been touted as a lifeline for independent film-makers, who struggle for attention in sequel-laden summers such as this one. Since the cost of digital distribution is almost zero, the thinking goes, cinemas ought to gamble on mo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=737 2007-07-16 03:07:58 That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger,- and philosophy should still wander towards the meaning of its death - or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying (as is silently confessed http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=736 2007-07-14 10:07:53 Tensions are rising in Turkey's schools and universities as academics and scientists confront the growing influence of Islamic creationists. "Without science, modern civilisation is impossible," says Haluk Ertan, a geneticist at Istanbul University, " http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=735 2007-07-14 09:07:28 A massive granite monument at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula in western Turkey commemorates the 86,692 Ottoman soldiers who died fighting the Allies during the first world war. To many Turks it also represents the moment at which the armed forces s http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=734 2007-07-13 08:07:41 In this essay, I address the question of whether the indisputable progress being made by the neurosciences poses a genuine threat to the language game of responsible agency. I begin by situating free will as an ineliminable component of our practices of http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=733 2007-07-06 11:07:01 Shortly after he was nominated by Turkey's outgoing government to be a high-profile candidate in this month's general election, Mehmet Simsek made an acceptance speech to ruling party worthies. It did not go down well. "I said all these stupid things a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=732 2007-07-03 08:07:26 At a time when Islamist terrorism seems to have returned to the centre of London, it is easy to forget that during the 20th century terror was used on a vast scale by secular regimes. Today suicide attacks are automatically linked with a belief in martyrd http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=731 2007-06-30 08:06:11 Many EU politicians and their voters are unsure about the merits of Turkish accession. Europe’s entrepreneurs are not. They are showing confidence by investing billions into the fast-growing Turkish economy, partly because they expect that EU accession http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=730 2007-06-30 07:06:57 Imagine that you wanted the EU to go the whole hog, totus porcus, toward statehood. What would you have most wanted to get out of the recent Brussels summit? In fact, much of your work would already have been done. The EU currently possesses many of th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=729 2007-06-26 10:06:56 Richard Gere’s Clifford Irving, a charlatan and a fool, is also an innocent, blundering into something far bigger and darker than his talent or imagination can contain. “The Hoax” gestures beyond the particulars of its case toward a pervasive social uneas http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=728 2007-06-23 07:06:06 Angelina Jolie plays Mariane Pearl, the wife of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal correspondent kidnapped and beheaded in Karachi. The story begins on the day of his disappearance; as the horrors unfurl, we see Mariane replaying in her mind the moment w http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=727 2007-06-23 07:06:04 It depicts a global economy in which nearly all signs are positive -- and in which the problems that do exist, such as stagnation or setbacks in sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, will be solved if economic growth and technological improvemen http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=726 2007-06-21 16:06:15 Slate has asked a number of philosophers and intellectuals to share reminiscences of Dick Rorty, personal and otherwise. Rorty, whose characteristic attitude was a shrug and a ho-hum, believed that human beings must stop looking for some nonhuman or extra http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=725 2007-06-20 05:06:28 The Palestinian ruin was a long time in coming. No other national movement has had the indulgence granted the Palestinians over the last half-century, and the results can be seen in the bravado and the senseless violence, in the inability of a people to c http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=724 2007-06-20 03:06:27 “In a Dark Dark House” is, according to LaBute, his first attempt to weave into dramatic fiction “a kernel of hard fact” about his own family, which is otherwise “shrouded in shadows and sadness.” This is perhaps why the play, which deals with sexual jeal http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=723 2007-06-19 16:06:00 For Richard Rorty, the importance of democracy is that it creates a liberal society in which rival truth claims can compete and accommodate each other. His pragmatism was postmodern, tolerant to a fault, its moral and progressive conclusions never appeali http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=722 2007-06-19 07:06:44 Genetic research DNA tests on their Italian descendants show the 'tuscii' came from Turkey. They gave us the word "person" and invented a symbol of iron rule later adopted by the fascists. Some even argue it was they who really moulded Roman civilisation http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=721 2007-06-18 13:06:23 Animals can evolve either to produce a lot of babies very quickly, or to live longer but reproduce more slowly. Animals facing lots of risks — such as getting eaten by predators — may be better on the fast track. Scientists who have studied the life spans http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=720 2007-06-17 03:06:59 n Turkey, the military and the government are engaged in an all-out struggle for power. The country is deeply divided, and decidedly unstable. Turkish writer Ahmet Altan describes his country's paradoxes and warns of the potentially dire consequences. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=719 2007-06-16 03:06:40 This paper shows that it is plausible that the Cartesian belief in the self-transparency of minds is actually an innate aspect of our mind-reading faculty. But it acknowledges that the crucial evidence needed to establish this claim hasn’t been look http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=718 2007-06-15 14:06:17 Richard Bernstein and I are almost exact contemporaries, were educated in mostly the same placesbymostlythe same people,have been exalted by many of the same hopes, and have been talking to one http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=717 2007-06-13 17:06:34 France is threatening to block part of Turkey's membership bid to join the European Union this month, in the first sign President Nicolas Sarkozy is serious about pushing Ankara into an arms-length relationship with Europe. Mr Sarkozy's officials in Br http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=716 2007-06-13 06:06:27 You do not have to be very conservative to find Rorty startling. Even Bernard Williams, himself notably keen on Nietzsche, found it necessary to insist that he stands a long way from Rorty, who is a target of his recent book "Truth and Truthfulness". And http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=715 2007-06-11 04:06:17 We interviewed Richard Rorty for four hours over the course of a weekend in Charlottesville. This interview is not only, we think, ideally timed, following closely several recent publications by Rorty, but captures Rorty at his most energetic. Rorty’s http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=714 2007-06-10 17:06:39 In “the bell curve of ideological allegiance,” the large bulging center has settled, for now, on an “implicit libertarian synthesis, one which reaffirms the core disciplines that underlie and sustain the modern lifestyle while making much greater allowanc http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=713 2007-06-10 06:06:10 As the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Brown certainly has the authority to examine the Princess of Wales as a creation and a casualty of the media glare. Perhaps not incidentally, Brown’s own years in the spotlight were bookended by Dian http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=712 2007-06-09 12:06:09 Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=711 2007-06-08 18:06:00 Does the Lord love insects best? They're so nice He made them twice: On Day 5 He makes "the living creatures of every kind that creep." Three verses, and 24 hours later, He makes "all kinds of creeping things of the earth." http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=710 2007-06-07 11:06:46 How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We can see the problem in stark form if we ask how we could tell whether representati http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=709 2007-06-06 14:06:29 On May 30, Britain's 120,000-strong University and College Union voted to endorse a motion to boycott Israeli universities, calling on British academics to condemn "the complicity of Israeli academics in the occupation." In the upcoming weeks, local branc http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=708 2007-06-14 13:06:56 It isn't just doctors who should be queuing up to talk to Jan Grebski, a 65-year-old who suddenly and inexplicably emerged from a 19-year-long coma. Economists and political scientists should also pay a visit to the ex-railway worker's home in Dzialdowo, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=707 2007-06-05 05:06:30 Dawkins launches into a full-on appeal for atheists to make public their beliefs and to aggressively fight the incursion of religion into politics and education. Scientists and intellectuals hold very different beliefs about God from the American public, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=706 2007-06-03 07:06:08 If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond disagreement with its author and try to identify the sins and deformities that animated him to write it (and I have certainly noticed that those who publicly affirm charity and compassion and fo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=705 2007-06-02 11:06:26 The little red prayer book was handed out in a public primary school here in western Turkey in early May. It was small enough to fit in a pocket, but it carried a big message: Pray in the Muslim way. Get others to pray, too. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=704 2007-06-02 02:06:47 Are you a threat to Turkey's secularism? Do you have a hidden agenda? Gul (laughs): Before we were in office I'm sure you were warned 'oh these people are coming, you must be careful'. I'm sure you have been monitoring us these past four and a half yea http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=703 2007-06-01 05:06:24 Hayrunisa Gul offers The Times tea and Turkish delicacies, smiles constantly, laughs readily and talks enthusiastically about her children, her garden, helping the disabled – about almost anything, in fact, except the deeply controversial strip of floral- http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=702 2007-06-01 05:06:15 Turkey's parliament yesterday defied a presidential veto and re-approved a package of constitutional amendments that will radically change the way the country is governed. Approval of the measures will also deepen an institutional fight between the gov http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=701 2007-06-01 04:06:50 n 1980, Bill lost his first race for reelection as governor, partly because Hillary irritated so many people by looking and acting like a campus insurgent, with baggy dresses, thick glasses, and brown frizzy hair. Faced with the menace of early retirement http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=700 2007-06-01 03:06:48 Plenty of English writers and intellectuals have professed an allergy to theory, generalization and system — a self-administered inoculation against Frenchness, among other maladies — but few can match Amis’s stubborn gusto in insisting on the adequacy of http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=699 2007-06-01 03:06:15 The Islamist philosopher Tariq Ramadan is a hero of the left in Europe, and he is increasingly admired in the United States. A closer look at him reveals disturbing ideas and influences, and amounts to a closer look at the intellectual universe of Islamis http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=698 2007-05-31 11:05:00 Helvetica is the ubiquitous sans-serif font that some have called the official typeface of the 20th century. Even if you don't know its name, you'll probably recognize its face. Helvetica is everywhere. It's been used in countless corporate logos, includi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=697 2007-05-30 14:05:06 Posner locates the modern concept of plagiarism at least partly in the development of a market for “expressive works,” which supplanted the private patronage of writers and other artists, and carefully distinguishes plagiarism from allusion and “creative http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=696 2007-05-30 08:05:14 The coming into being of the notion of "author" constitutes the priveleged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences. Even today, when we reconstruct the history of a concept, literary genre http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=695 2007-05-29 15:05:38 Turkish MPs traded punches during a debate on constitutional reforms that would create democratic elections for the presidency. Trouble started in the assembly yesterday when Ummet Kandogan, an independent, accused the President, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, of http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=694 2007-05-29 10:05:40 In “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=693 2007-05-27 03:05:20 The way immigrants marry is a key factor in the way they assimilate, or don’t. In 2000, the German Youth Institute reported that 53 percent of Turkish women ages 16 to 29 would not consider marrying a German “under any circumstances.” Indeed, the big gap http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=692 2007-05-24 12:05:10 Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction.The way people replay and recast memories, day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story. And as it evolves, that larger story in turn colors the inte http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=691 2007-05-24 12:05:48 A debate is raging in Istanbul about just how much skin advertising billboards should be allowed to show. The dispute highlights the deep divisions between Muslims and secularists in the country. And it may become an election issue. The model, wearing http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=690 2007-05-21 12:05:37 The London neighborhood of the author's youth, Finsbury Park, is now one of the breeding grounds for a new phenomenon: the British jihadist. How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=689 2007-05-21 13:05:14 In appeasing islamists, schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils. The schools are also eliminating lessons about the Crusades because such lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=688 2007-05-21 13:05:30 Koc Holding, Turkey's biggest industrial company, has indicated it is likely to put up for sale soon its majority stake in Migros, the country's largest supermarket group. A queue of businesses, including Carrefour of France, Tesco of the UK, Germany's http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=687 2007-05-21 08:05:14 On pages 56-59 of Histoire de la folie [Madness and Civilization]I said that dreams and madness have neither the same status nor the same role in the development of Cartesian doubt: dreams allow me to doubt this place where I am, this sheet of paper I see http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=686 2007-05-20 11:05:57 Let's Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death. This is not my blog, but I don’t have a blog, or a space, and I’d like to be heard for a bit. Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=685 2007-05-20 07:05:52 Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=684 2007-05-20 06:05:33 The inaugural New Yorker Conference, “2012: Stories From the Near Future,” took place on May 6 and 7, 2007. Malcolm Gladwell, author of the Tipping Point and the Blink, talks on the importance of stubbornness and collaboration in problem-solving. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=683 2007-05-19 12:05:40 One of Germany's most singular achievements is to have associated itself so intimately in the world's imagination with the darkest evils of the two worst political systems of the most murderous century in human history. The words "Nazi," "SS," and "Auschw http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=682 2007-05-19 07:05:14 Psychology isn’t Mr. Fincher’s bag; he isn’t interested in what lies and writhes beneath, but what is right there: the visible evidence. And what beautiful evidence it is. His polished technique can leave you slack-jawed, as can his scrupulous attention t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=681 2007-05-19 04:05:14 Mr. Wong’s first English-language feature, takes place in a postcard America of diners and red neon signs, a land of heartbreak and second chances where folks play poker and drink whiskey and subsist on cheeseburgers, pork chops and, in at least one case, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=680 2007-05-18 18:05:08 Some kinds of perversity are so bizarre that one despairs of ever understanding them. The mental state of Robert Hanssen, who for more than twenty years spied for the Soviet Union and then for Russia while productively employed as a counterintelligence an http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=679 2007-05-17 15:05:42 Feminist theory embraces a position that collapses moral categories in ways that defy logic, common sense, and basic decency. It obliterates distinctions between what goes on in Afghanistan and what goes on in Beverly Hills. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=678 2007-05-17 15:05:40 In the Hindu-right version of history, a persistent theme is that of humiliated masculinity: Hindus have been subordinate for centuries, and their masculinity insulted, in part because they have not been aggressive and violent enough. The two leading ideo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=677 2007-05-17 10:05:46 In “Dialogues,” Hume remarks that a person who openly proclaimed atheism, being guilty of “indiscretion and imprudence,” would not be very formidable. His case against religion is as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=676 2007-05-15 15:05:37 For Hitchens,his subject is personal. He is a great friend of Salman Rushdie, and he reminds us that it wasn’t just some crazed fringe Muslim who threatened Rushdie’s life. Religious leaders put aside their differences to agree that Rushdie had it coming http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=675 2007-05-14 12:05:40 In quantum mechanics, there is a probability that this pen will tunell through the table and will be on the floor. Because it can behave as a wave, it can go through; we call that the ‘tunnel effect.’ If you calculate the probability that this happens, it http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=674 2007-05-07 14:05:16 Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; other http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=673 2007-05-06 10:05:17 Readers bemused by provocateur novelist Michel Houellebecq’s notorious ‘Les Particules Elémentaires’ – comme moi – may find themselves pleasantly surprised by this handsome, scabrous German adaptation. At its heart lie two excellent performances, by ‘Run http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=672 2007-05-06 05:05:09 Americans bought only 76,966 pianos. As much as people may love music, most of them apparently don’t feel the need to make it for themselves. According to Census Bureau statistics, only 7.3 percent of American adults have played a musical instrument in t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=671 2007-05-06 04:05:35 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 of whiskey, 22 of port, 8 of hard cider and 7 bowls of punch so large that, it was said, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=670 2007-05-05 11:05:45 The most notable example today of the symbiosis between certain Western intellectuals and Latin American caudillos is the love affair between American and European Idiots and Hugo Chávez. The Venezuelan leader, despite his nationalist ten http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=669 2007-05-06 04:05:37 Most people subscribe to the soft form of PC, which holds that the world will be a better place when we all have a little more equitable love in our hearts. Fine. But the hard form, played out at Duke and Harvard, is not about evening the odds; it's about http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=668 2007-05-03 19:05:24 Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us. As he puts it, our bodies are made up of 100 trillion little robots, none of them with an individual co http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=667 2007-05-03 15:05:44 Gladwell follows the career of a food industry consultant who uncovered a key secret to what eaters like. Running huge focus groups to find customers' truest tastes, Gladwell's hero draws a radical conclusion, an epiphany that has defined food marketing e http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=666 2007-05-03 14:05:31 In a talk -- presented before the publication of Freakonomics -- Steven Levitt presents one of the book's more fascinating analyses. Sifting data collected through first-person interviews with a Chicago drug gang, he shows that drug dealing is not at all http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=665 2007-05-03 14:05:24 The main contributing factor to France's dismal state is probably the disintegration of the family. The divorce rate has grown to almost 40 percent in 2005; 20 percent of all French couples are unwed; 40 percent of all children are born to unmarried paren http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=664 2007-05-02 13:05:32 When an upwardly mobile immigrant couple learns that their newly born baby cannot leave the hospital without a name--in India several years might pass before a child is given a formal name--the father impulsively calls his son Gogol after his favorite wri http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=663 2007-05-02 08:05:08 Empathy implies having “a theory of mind” – an animal needs to be able to recognize that other individuals also possess attitudes and emotions. De Waal convincingly argues that consolation in great apes is yet another indicator that they possess a degree http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=661 2007-05-01 14:05:24 In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=660 2007-05-01 14:05:22 There are very few mosques in devastated Darfur, nor are there any women wearing the veil. Darfur genocide is about radical Islamism versus muslim population resisting Islamism. This is the regime that, in the late '90s, chose to give asylum to Osama bin http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=659 2007-05-01 06:05:40 Allegra Marshall (Famke Janssen), a mother at the private school where Jake Singer (Chris Eigeman) teaches, is tall, luminescent, recently widowed, disturbingly wealthy, and, to my eyes, hundreds of miles out of Jake’s league; even as the story clasped th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=658 2007-04-30 13:04:33 Kennan was not a happy fellow. His mother died when he was an infant. His own disposition was solitary and melancholy. The great Protestant virtues — duty, discipline, self-denial — ran deep in him. He saw Russia, his great subject, free from the dogmas http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=657 2007-04-30 03:04:53 To suggest that Stanwyck never belonged in the first rank of screen beauties would be ungallant but true. To argue, however, that she lacked a ready supply of male victims would be demonstrable nonsense. She had cheekbones of a wicked cut and curve, archa http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=656 2007-04-30 02:04:24 Muslim Brothers are fundamentalist in their ideology. They aren't necessarily terrorists; they want to establish a religious state based on their interpretation of the Koran. While their leaders “pay lip service to democracy, women’s rights and so on http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=655 2007-04-29 18:04:53 Perhaps the most infamous example is a paper written by Emily Oster. While still an undergraduate in Harvard, Oster had become fascinated by the so-called "missing women" problem--the hypothesis, attributed to Amartya Sen, that gender discrimination in As http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=654 2007-04-29 15:04:06 A strange loop is a phenomenon that involves reference to itself. An artwork, a thought, may twist back on to itself and self-refer. The more sophisticated a system’s self-referential capabilities, the more soulful it is http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=652 2007-04-25 16:04:29 Aside from publishing books that are mostly comic, moreover, Kingsley and Martin aren’t much alike as writers. Kingsley’s comedy stems from precise social observation. Martin’s characters tend to be caricatures and exaggerations, as their names suggest — http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=651 2007-04-25 14:04:31 Lucky Jim's real comedy, and its originality, comes from its bracing contempt for culture and higher education—for madrigal singing, and lectures on “organic” village life. The originality also comes from its unglossed sexual desire: girls are not there http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=650 2007-04-23 03:04:19 In the supremely vulgar “Black Book”, a Jewish faux-blond signs up for the ultimate Mata Hari assignment and agrees to bed the head of Gestapo. It takes just one glance at the top of her head with its creeping dark roots the Gestapo discover the truth. G http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=649 2007-04-21 10:04:57 Evangelical churches are hardly museums. To the contrary, it's the mainline churches with their stained glass windows, their clergy in vestments, and their organists playing Bach that may seem like museums next to the evangelical megachurches, with their http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=648 2007-04-21 05:04:54 Observed in the wild and tested in captivity, chimpanzees invite comparison with humans, their close relatives. They bear a family resemblance that fascinates people, and scientists see increasing evidence of similarities in chimp behavior and skills, mak http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=647 2007-04-21 02:04:10 The price of oil and the pace of freedom are inversely correlated. We thought the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to unleash an unstoppable tide of free markets and free people, and for about a decade it did just that. But those years coincided with oil http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=646 2007-04-15 13:04:58 In one sequence that redefines bathroom humor, Mr. Zizek connects the shower drain in “Psycho” with the backed-up toilet in “The Conversation” and compares the experience of looking up at a blank screen before a movie to that of staring into a toilet bowl http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=645 2007-04-15 13:04:57 When New York City was still New Amsterdam a quarter-millennium ago, the teenage children of the Dutch settlers were allowed to enjoy a physical intimacy known as bundling, a word related to “binding, defined” as “to share a bed with a person of the oppos http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=644 2007-04-15 03:04:43 Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them.The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that wh http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=643 2007-04-15 03:04:59 They have come to that conclusion by drawing on data from a 15-year experiment conducted by Purina, an American dog-food company. This experiment involved taking 48 Labrador pups from seven litters just after they were weaned. The dogs were put in pairs, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=642 2007-04-15 03:04:10 In the week since the release of 15 British sailors whom Iranian forces took hostage in Iraqi waters in March, the behaviour of the British captives has been held up in many press accounts as pitiable. Their smiles as they were released in ill-fitting sui http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=641 2007-04-14 12:04:59 Ysacar Morales and her stepfather Daniel are sitting on the front step of their house in San José Cotiza, a poor neighbourhood in central Caracas, reminiscing about beef and black beans. “There hasn’t been meat in the shops since February,” says Ysacar http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=640 2007-04-14 12:04:58 For years, Garry Kasparov’s opponents were lone figures across chessboards, or the occasional supercomputer. Now he faces riot police with shields and batons. The former world chess champion seems an unlikely rabble-rouser. But since giving up chess in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=639 2007-04-14 12:04:55 Political observations are scattered randomly throughout the book. Kasparov argues that he was forced to leave his “comfort zone” of chess by the need to “be where I thought I was most wanted and needed”, above all by the thought of posterity. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=638 2007-04-13 02:04:39 The events described in these stories are real," humorist David Sedaris wrote in the introductory note to Naked, his collection of nonfiction essays. The New York Times was convinced: When Naked hit the best-seller list, it categorized the book as no http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=636 2007-04-12 12:04:31 “Soft lines” and a “vibrant personality” — say like those on a Volkswagen New Beetle — are typical attributes of a gay man’s car, and fashion-forward red gauges and other styling cues, for example, make the Pontiac G6 more of a gay car than its sibling, t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=635 2007-04-12 07:04:06 Research has shown that having older brothers substantially increases the chances that a man will be gay. Older sisters don’t count, nor does it matter whether the brothers are in the house when the boy is reared. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=634 2007-04-10 12:04:58 Grindhouse includes two new features and such divertissements as trailers for ridiculous imaginary pictures (“Werewolf Women of the S.S.”), ads for revolting food at local restaurants, and artifacts of down-at-the-heels moviegoing from decades ago. At cli http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=633 2007-04-10 10:04:31 The hope is "radical," because it is virtually impossible to say beforehand what the shape of this new kind of life will be. This has to emerge in specific new forms, drawing on the particular cultural resources of each society. There is no general formul http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=631 2007-04-10 04:04:11 The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=630 2007-04-10 03:04:37 It is a near-universal experience, the invisible clause on one’s birth certificate stipulating that one will, upon reaching maturity, feel the urge to engage in activities often associated with sexual desire http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=629 2007-04-10 02:04:26 Two other conditions that have increased in frequency recently are asthma and allergies, both of which are caused by the immune system attacking cells of the body it is supposed to protect. One explanation for the rise of these two conditions is the hygie http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=628 2007-04-08 15:04:08 It’s a great car chase, but it’s also a metaphor. “Grindhouse,” soaked in bloody nostalgia for the cheesy, disreputable pleasures of an older form of movie entertainment, can also be seen as a passionate protest against the present state of the entertainm http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=626 2007-04-07 03:04:56 The Old Testament states that only a select group of Jews were taken to Babylon. In effect, the Babylonians took away the Jewish elites, and left behind the poor and unskilled. By the time the exiles returned, many of those remaining behind in Judah had b http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=625 2007-04-04 15:04:19 The decision to establish a World Bank office in Baghdad seemed to confirm the worst fears of Wolfowitz’s critics. Wolfowwitz couldn’t do nation-building in the Pentagon, because military abhors the idea. But the World Bank is another way to make it happ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=624 2007-04-04 14:04:33 In order to solve the paradox of the arrow (if a body does not move at each instant, it cannot move in an infinite set of instants) the dialetheic account of motion accepts the Spread Hypothesis: 'A body cannot be localised to a point it is occupying at a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=623 2007-04-04 07:04:15 This is trash pretending to serve the cause of history: a “Dirty Dozen” knockoff with one eye on “Schindler’s List.” Everything about it, from the earnest strivings of the musical score to the beery gropings of the Germans, has the whiff of soap opera. At http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=622 2007-04-04 07:04:34 Albert was the only son of a mathematics-minded but financially inept father and musically gifted woman of some inherited means. When a daughter was born to the couple two years later Albert looked at her and said, “Yes, but where are the wheels?” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=621 2007-03-30 11:03:59 In "300", the persian king Xerxes is portrayed as a queeny seven-footer somewhere between RuPaul and Ming the Merciless. And Tehran is quick to denounce 300 as an insult to their civilization, and a “psychological warfare” that was intended to prepare the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=620 2007-03-26 12:03:06 In Sixteenth Century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "The spctators, including kings and queens, shrieked with http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=619 2007-03-26 11:03:23 The biggest changes are likely to be seen in what becomes a book in the first place. Here the internet may indeed be to some book genres what Apple has been to music or what YouTube has been to video. Among younger listeners albums are dead. They have bee http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=618 2007-03-26 10:03:07 “The Namesake”, a new film directed by Mira Nair, deals with a young Bengali bride and a bowl of Rice Krispies. The husband leaves home early to work on his PhD thesis, the bride is left alone to grapple with the mystery of the American breakfast. She fil http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=617 2007-03-26 10:03:52 After Ataturk died in 1938, Inonu, his successor,quickly transformed the nation state into a near-fascist system. The old racial and pan-Turkic element in Turkish nationalism, downplayed by Ataturk, was now revived with a vengeance. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=616 2007-03-24 16:03:38 A clear sign of progress in Western society is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is “dogmatically” clear to everyone that rape is wrong. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, he would appear so ridiculous as to disqualify hims http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=615 2007-03-24 05:03:03 Not everyone who is a Canberra Planner believes everything in this credo. To be a Canberra planner is a matter of believing enough of the doctrines associated with the Canberra plan. Secondly, not everyone who is in the philosophy program in the RSSS is http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=613 2007-03-21 11:03:18 Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; other http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=612 2007-03-21 10:03:16 A new book by Zizek is supposed to include discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera; jokes from the Marx http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=611 2007-03-21 04:03:39 It has become something of a truism that Web culture is driven not by traditional, top-down forms of tastemaking like the judgments of professional critics or the strategies of corporate marketers, but rather by the lateral operations of social networks. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=610 2007-03-20 16:03:49 Many philosophers believe that conscious reasoning plays a large part in governing human ethical behavior and are therefore unwilling to let everything proceed from emotions, like sympathy, which may be evident in chimpanzees. The impartial element of mor http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=609 2007-03-20 11:03:19 There's not a whole lot you can't say in public. Social norms may force you to go to rehab for your stupidity but the law can't touch you at all. Likewise, there's not much that cannot be said about you. "Exposure of the self to others in varying degrees http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=608 2007-03-20 11:03:45 Napoleon's dream of an open, French-dominated Europe haunted the British unconscious, and was not entirely forgotten by the time the Common Market/EEC/EU came along. Many Britons regard its operation as the palest possible version of a democratic system, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=607 2007-03-20 10:03:23 It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most common form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=606 2007-03-20 10:03:46 The story of how Mendel’s and Darwin’s respective legacies were transformed to create the modern, synthetic theory of evolution, is a long and complex one. Indeed, the synthesis wasn’t completed until the mid-1940s, when naturalists and laboratory biologi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=605 2007-03-20 10:03:43 The central argument of Dinesh D'Souza's book is that cultural globalization is the last chance for theoconservatism. If a majority of Americans do not support a divine moral order, the obvious move is to enlist the third world fundamentalist believers in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=604 2007-03-14 19:03:23 This is not Luke Skywalker here," said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), discussing his friend and Senate colleague John McCain's second run for the presidency. "This is a totally different campaign." Graham was looking for a way to reassure his fellow http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=603 2007-03-12 16:03:35 Lagerfeld’s determination to stay current requires ruthlessness and a lack of sentimentality. “He kind of passes on things and people, because he doesn’t like the past. So then he decides you’re the past and then he just puts you in the trash.” According http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=602 2007-03-12 14:03:54 Reaction within the egalitarian Wikipedia world has not been universally favorable. Many seemed dumbstruck at the idea of Wikipedia verifies academic authority when the site’s motto is “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=601 2007-03-12 04:03:22 Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists ar http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=600 2007-03-11 12:03:24 “The Good Shepherd” has a reticent beauty (the colors are subdued and blended) and a sombre exactitude that gives way, now and then, to episodes of anguished emotion. Like Al Pacino in “The Godfather II,” Matt Damon recedes further and further into himsel http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=599 2007-03-11 08:03:08 “Heyday” tries also to be a novel of ideas, gamely providing mouthpieces to test theories of political unrest, economy and evolution, free will versus security. Darwin walks on as a character, and Engels enjoys the enthusiasm of Benjamin. Manifest Destiny http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=598 2007-03-10 16:03:51 We have every right to be jealous of the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. First, he is 33. Second, his name makes him sound like a lover with a duelling scar on his cheekbone in a nineteenth-century novel. And third, being German, he has http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=597 2007-03-10 11:03:21 There are two good men in ''The Lives of Others, and they are presented in counterpoint, never on screen at the same time. One, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), is a successful playwright; the other, Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), is the Stasi officer w http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=596 2007-03-10 10:03:54 Globalization has bound people and markets closer than ever—or so we’re told. But a close look at the data reveals a world that’s not so integrated: more than 90 percent of all phone calls, Web traffic, and investment is local. What’s more, even this smal http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=595 2007-03-10 10:03:28 A declaration by the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (TÜSÝAD) last week was very important. I could not draw attention to this declaration because other subjects have come up. However, it was definitely a statement that needed to be d http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=594 2007-03-09 18:03:34 Abraham Lincoln was "emphatically, the black man's President," wrote the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1865, "the first to show any respect for their rights as men." A decade later, however, in a speech at the unveiling of an emancipation monum http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=593 2007-03-09 17:03:40 The Lives of Others, the first movie written and directed by a 33-year-old German with the traffic-stopping name of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. The Lives of Others joins the Russian film Burnt by the Sun on a very short list of motion-picture master http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=592 2007-03-09 01:03:25 (Introduction: Mark Poster)Baudrillard has developed a theory to make intelligible one of the fascinating and perplexing aspects of advanced industrial society: the proliferation of communications through the media. This new language practice differs f http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=591 2007-03-08 14:03:08 To see what philosophy may look like in the future, consider the problem that gave rise to the huge literature on vagueness: the paradox of the heap. Soames formulates it as follows: ‘If one has something that is not a heap of sand, and one adds a single http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=590 2007-03-08 04:03:08 The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=589 2007-03-07 17:03:14 Perihan Magden (pictured) is not, by her own admission, "a bodyguard kind of woman". Energetic and feisty, with a mass of tousled hair falling in her face and a decrepit, fading rucksack slung carelessly over one shoulder, she doesn't look like someone w http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=588 2007-03-07 15:03:21 Orwell and the Spanish Civil War are all the rage again. Perhaps brought on by the fusion of fantasy and reality that was the international box office success Pan's Labyrinth, Western intellectuals have swooped down on the warmed-over carrion of Catalonia http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=587 2007-03-07 13:03:06 In my last article, I looked at former President Kenan Evren’s statement about the Kurdish problem from another point of view and drew attention to “the change some former generals go through after they retire.” What I wanted to explain was why they did n http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=586 2007-03-06 16:03:30 Have you a duty to save the greater rather than the lesser number from death when you cannot save all? Most moral philosophers would reply that you do, at least when so doing is of little cost to you and “all other things are equal,” which is to say th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=585 2007-03-06 16:03:27 We philosophers have been reared on a story of Descartes as a champion of epistemology and metaphysics. According to this story, Descartes was principally concerned with achieving certain knowledge. His philosophical project thus centered on the intellect http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=584 2007-03-06 15:03:53 As Pythagoras was passing a smithy, he heard that the sounds made by the hammers exemplified the intervals of fourth, fifth and octave, so he measured their weights and found their ratios to be respectively 4:3, 3:2, 2:1. Unfortunately for this anecdote, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=583 2007-03-05 02:03:17 The survival of poetry, especially if written before the invention of print, has often been a matter of luck or accident. Consigned to caves in the deserts of the Middle East, it might be preserved by the hot, dry climate for a couple of thousand years be http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=582 2007-03-04 20:03:23 Foreign observers of Israel tend to focus so intently on the dangers the country faces from its Arab neighbours that they have largely missed an astonishing story that has been accelerating over the past few months: that of the Jewish state’s possible mov http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=581 2007-03-04 20:03:36 In Kundera’s somewhat Eurocentric view, the novel is uniquely able to express a highly ironic “antimodern modernism,” a mode of disillusioned thinking that was fathered by Cervantes, who with Rabelais, Fielding, Sterne and Diderot established a lineage th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=580 2007-03-04 18:03:53 Boink is what happens when a group of undergrads from Boston university decide to publish a sex magazine.For all its raunchiness, its founders profess a certain idealism and purity of purpose. Oleyourryk stressed the authenticity of Boink’s subjects http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=579 2007-03-04 17:03:03 Modern liberal societies have weak collective identities. Postmodern elites, especially in Europe, feel that they have evolved beyond identities defined by religion and nation. But if our societies cannot assert positive liberal values, they may be challe http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=578 2007-03-04 06:03:18 Who will be ruling Russia next year? Part of what fuels the uncertainty surrounding the succession is what Putin will do once a second term ends. He will be only 55. It is hard to imagine him slipping into quiet retirement. Speculation abounds that he int http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=577 2007-03-03 13:03:06 “Babel” feels like the first example of a new genre—the highbrow globalist tearjerker.Arriaga and Iñárritu may be too obsessed with the unfair distribution of power and capital in the world to operate freely as radical experimenters in form. In 1960, in t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=576 2007-03-03 12:03:09 A man-sized dolphin with a large flipper jutting from his side greeted guests at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington this week. Over his costume he wore a T-shirt with the words: "Mitt Romney, flip-flopper." Giving his na http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=575 2007-03-03 07:03:17 It's a little before six in the morning and quite cold on the beach. It's low tide, and the sand is wet and hardpacked and stony. This early on a Sunday, there are often only two people here, on the California coast just north of San Diego. Patricia Chu http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=574 2007-02-28 16:02:49 That Histoire de la Folie has at last been translated in full, in the year of what would have been Foucault's 80th birthday, is, of course, much to be welcomed. So as to duly celebrate the occasion, we can perhaps leave aside the question of why it has ta http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=573 2007-02-28 13:02:01 [registration required] There's a comic element to the political two-step that John McCain, Mitt Romney, and--to a lesser degree--Rudy Giuliani have all had to perform of late. It goes like this: Once-moderate Republicans who, in past lives, have either s http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=572 2007-02-27 17:02:39 We are told every day that great social problems stand before us and demand a solution, and we are assailed by oracles, threats, and warnings in reference to those problems. There is a school of writers who are playing quite a role as the heralds of the c http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=571 2007-02-27 16:02:45 Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism? From the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinej http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=570 2007-02-26 09:02:12 For the moment, Gore has absented himself from the 2008 Presidential race with a provisional explanation: He has no plans to be a candidate. He doesn’t expect to be a candidate. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=569 2007-02-26 09:02:32 Guantanamo's most pressing problems involve how prisoners get there in the first place and, potentially, negotiate their own release. Visiting there the only thing you could witness is courtesy and professionalism: An inmate in a La-Z-Boy sharing fries w http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=568 2007-02-25 08:02:55 A synopsis: David Lynch's new film, Inland Empire, is about an actress playing an actress playing an actress. I think. Another synopsis: David Lynch's new film, Inland Empire, is about non sequitur-spouting human rabbits starring in a sitcom that could ha http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=567 2007-02-25 08:02:37 Part of the reason Americans think everyone should go to college is for its noneducational uses. Colleges are the country’s most effective marriage brokers. They are also a means of redistributing four years’ worth of leisure time from the sad stub-end of http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=566 2007-02-25 04:02:10 We have it on good authority that the truth shall set us free. David Geffen, Hollywood mogul, spoke truth to Maureen Dowd last week when talking about Hillary http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=565 2007-02-24 17:02:40 Tom Tykwer, the director of “Perfume” (and also, most memorably, of “Run Lola Run”) asks to be taken seriously, which has the unfortunate, predictable effect of making his new movie all the more ridiculous. It tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille ( http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=564 2007-02-26 15:02:03 Commentators like to go on about Thomas Pynchon's daunting modernity--the indexical learning, the fierce assays and essays in thermodynamics and polymers and mathematics, the brilliant parodies and pastiches of different novel genres--but fewer point out http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=563 2007-02-24 12:02:13 For their testimonial value, Jean Améry's writings are obligatory reading for anyone interested in studies of the Holocaust. But Améry can and must also be read as philosophy, argues Roy Ben-Shai. In Améry's work, the combination of the testimonial and th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=562 2007-02-21 17:02:12 I've just worked out how the federasts are going to do it. Ever since the French and Dutch "No" votes, the craftiest legal minds in Brussels have been looking for a way to resurrect the European Constitution. Now, they have found one: a way so devilishly http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=561 2007-02-20 16:02:46 The veil is a mark of separation and defiance against mainstream British culture and should not be used, Britain's first Muslim peer said today. Lord Ahmed of Rotherham called for a sensible and sensitive debate among Muslims on whether veils were need http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=560 2007-02-20 15:02:44 My idea of a great president is one who acts in accordance with his oath of office to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Not since the presidency of Grover Cleveland has any president achieved greatness by this standard http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=559 2007-02-19 13:02:45 A hundred and eight years after his birth, 27 years after his death, Alfred Hitchcock is still the world's most famous director, regarded everywhere with affection and respect. Thanks to his cameo appearances, he's the only film-maker who popular audience http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=558 2007-02-18 11:02:16 The Yacoubian Building is the sort of dense neighbourhood novel which, though quite out of style when set in London or Paris, has been revived for the banlieue of downtown Cairo. With its parade of big-city characters, both ludicrous and tender, its warm http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=557 2007-02-18 11:02:38 The hubbub after a recent commercial showing two auto mechanics accidentally falling into lip-lock while eating the same Snickers bar went a long way toward showing how powerfully charged a public kiss between two men remains. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=556 2007-02-18 11:02:22 Widespread desertions from Zimbabwe's army and police are weakening Robert Mugabe's security forces as large strikes loom because of the country's deepening economic collapse. With inflation now at a global record of 1,600 per cent, The Observer can re http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=555 2007-02-18 11:02:25 In post 9/11 America, seeing Rudy Giuliani in the flesh can feel like meeting a living saint. That day in early September 2001 is sacrosanct in the national psyche and Giuliani is the holy symbol of American resilience; American defiance; American courage http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=554 2007-02-18 11:02:30 SKINHEADS used to chant: “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack”, but now ethnic minorities have turned into the strongest backers of Britishness. Research to be published this week argues that as the white population fragments into English, Scottish, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=553 2007-02-18 10:02:46 A large number of very fine, well written, deeply researched and important works are being published to the sound of deafening silence. And most of the vast non-specialist audience of university graduates hasn't a clue about what is going on in history, p http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=552 2007-02-17 12:02:34 Turkey's fraught relationship with America is heading into a new crisis. In a hopeful sign, Mr Gul has complained that “people outside Turkey think you can be thrown into jail for opening your mouth.” Worse, as Mr Dink tragically discovered, you can be ki http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=550 2007-02-17 11:02:42 In Painted Veil-adapted from Somerset Maugham’s novel with the same name, it’s the 1920s, and as China seethes with revolutionary unrest and cholera, an unhappily married British couple, played by Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, drift into a new state of c http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=549 2007-02-17 11:02:30 PP Vol 1+2 bring together some excellent papers by one of the greatest contemporary analytic philosophers. And unlike most contemporary analytic philosophers, Unger pulls it off with a style and a sense of humour that is inviting to professionals and laym http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=548 2007-02-17 10:02:56 Putin's aggressiveness does not signal a return to the Cold War. He is a more modest man: a mere mafia don and a murderer, seizing the economic resources and political power of a country for himself and his (mostly KGB) cronies. And promoting his vision o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=547 2007-02-17 10:02:29 As the millennium drew to its dismal close, George Steiner was asked to choose the best book of the past thousand years. He named the Commedia, saying: "Dante's totality of poetic form and philosophic thought, of 'local universality' and language http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=546 2007-02-16 16:02:59 It is hard to let go of Pythagoras. He has meant so much to so many for so long. I can with confidence say to readers of this essay: most of what you believe, or think you know, about Pythagoras is fiction, much of it deliberately contrived. Did he discov http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=545 2007-02-16 16:02:57 It seems an odd way to treat a friend. Washington's relations with Turkey, a key Nato ally, have been on the slide since 2003 when Ankara's parliament refused to allow US troops to transit into Iraq. That infuriated the Bush administration. Ensuing chaos http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=544 2007-02-16 12:02:49 Paul Kagame, the Rwandan President, says that his country will cement its bitter divorce from France and the French-speaking world, which he holds responsible for the 1994 slaughter of up to one million of his countrymen, by joining the Commonwealth later http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=543 2007-02-16 11:02:26 There are concerns that such funds are wiping out the benefits which international debt relief was supposed to bring to poor countries. Martin Kalunga-Banda, Zambian presidential adviser and a consultant to Oxfam told Newsnight, "That $40m is equal to http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=542 2007-02-16 12:02:22 Microfinance—the provision of financial services such as small loans to the world’s poor—has grown in the past decade, extending billions of dollars in credit to tens of millions of people. A major aim of the microfinance movement is to provide funds for http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=541 2007-02-16 09:02:30 Segolene Royal, the French Socialist presidential candidate, is trying to pull off a heroic political trick. She wants to appear to be modern, fresh and different. But she is all the while leaning on old-style socialist policies that have been ditched by http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=540 2007-02-16 08:02:18 Miss Smith married when she was 17 ans she worked as a waitress at Krispy Fried Chicken and then at Wal-Mart. On meeting her, what you first saw were the Breasts. There were only two of them, but they made a whole frontage: huge, compelling, pneumatic. T http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=539 2007-02-16 06:02:00 The union of Brian De Palma and the murdered woman known as the Black Dahlia should have been a marriage made in movie heaven. A master of modern horror, Mr. De Palma has a flair for the frenzy of violence, specifically when visited on the female body, wh http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=538 2007-02-15 17:02:47 What can a philosopher say about phantom limb syndrome? More specifically, what can a materialist philosopher say about phantom limb syndrome? At first glance, a phenomenon by which our 'corporeal imagination' -- what La Mettrie in the eighteenth century http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=537 2007-02-15 16:02:12 Summary: The massive growth of hedge funds has sparked warnings of instability and demands that the industry be regulated. But the fear of hedge funds is overblown, based on a misunderstanding of their role in the international financial system. In reali http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=536 2007-02-15 15:02:51 The film "The Lark Farm" is sure to stir up controversy at this year's Berlin Film Festival. It takes a close look at Turkey's most sensitive taboo. In one scene, a Turkish soldier stands awkwardly next to an opulently set table. He carefully picks up the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=535 2007-02-15 02:02:30 An Israeli professor has ordered his publisher to halt distribution of a new book that suggests a possible historical basis for the centuries-old charge that Jews murdered Christians and used their blood for ritual purposes. Ariel Toaff, a professor of m http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=534 2007-02-15 02:02:28 My epigraphs allude to the difficulties that people have had trying to see whether heterophenomenology is a trivial redescription of familiar practices, or a restatementof Husserl with nothing original in it, or a betrayal of Husserl, or a revolutionary http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=533 2007-02-16 09:02:55 When the star of the movie--Jude Law depicting a graceful and charming architect--discovers that a Bosnian teenage refugee is involved in robbing his office, he does what any tormented bobo architect would do in his place, namely, has sex with the boy’s m http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=532 2007-02-14 15:02:17 Those of us who loathe Republicans, especially Republican presidents, have some hope against hope that the Democrats will nominate a candidate who can save us from the certain doom of eternal Republican rule. Sadly, it seems that Bill Clinton, as much as http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=531 2007-02-14 13:02:19 Marketers are playing with fire by ambushing people at every turn. The more varied the places in which their ads appear, the more diverse the human situations in which they’ll be received. A result may turn out to be anger, not a sale. Any male computer o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=530 2007-02-14 08:02:54 China--a major consumer of Sudanese oil and a longtime supplier of equipment to Khartoum's military--would almost certainly foil efforts to punish Sudan economically. And so the West either isn't going to act or isn't going to act strongly enough, and t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=529 2007-02-14 08:02:12 From an islamist's perspective, (1) the extermination of millions was a good thing; (2) the extermination of millions was a Zionist fabrication; (3) the Holocaust resulted from a Jewish conspiracy against Germany that Hitler thwarted and punished; (4) the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=528 2007-02-13 16:02:08 Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is 10,000 years old; the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=527 2007-02-14 13:02:31 His new book, “The Enemy at Home,” is filled with incendiary assertions that “the cultural left is responsible for causing 9/11”; and that “the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=526 2007-02-12 21:02:30 “The Unbinding” began as a serial novel published on Slate that featured hyperlinks to a wide range of Wikipedia Web pages, YouTube clips, online news reports and blogs. Skip the links and “The Unbinding” tells a story of a cat-and-mouse game of domestic http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=525 2007-02-12 21:02:58 This latest confrontation with the U.S. should have been the capper to a bad winter for Ahmadinejad. Strangely, though, it may instead have brought about an upturn in his fortunes. Soon, oil prices started to rise, jumping twenty per cent in just two week http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=524 2007-02-12 21:02:44 Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Why are some Lay’s chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro, and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Moth http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=523 2007-02-12 20:02:41 Andrew Sullivan, who places the principle of “doubt”, empricism and epistemological modesty in the center of his own understanding of conservatism, regards deviations from these ideals as blasphemous. By this standard, however, nearly all the religious a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=522 2007-02-12 20:02:06 Hard though it is to believe, when EU and NATO officials meet, they may not talk about Afghanistan and Kosovo, their most significant operations. They can mill around the bar, but formal discussions are out. Two of the West's most important institutions, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=521 2007-02-12 20:02:10 “24” depicts the fight against Islamist extremism: as an all-consuming struggle for America’s survival that demands the toughest of tactics. Alluding vaguely to the fact that America must begin working through the “dark side” in countering terrorism. On “ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=520 2007-02-12 14:02:51 Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=519 2007-02-11 17:02:38 From the end of the second century C.E., Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring any Jewish father to educate his children. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this exogenous change in the religious and social norm had a major influence o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=518 2007-02-11 17:02:51 Pierre Bourdieu is a contemporary French sociologist who has written extensively on language and society.[1] On one level, his work can be seen as providing an extension on the later Wittgenstein’s treatment of language games.[2] I have elsewhere stress http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=517 2007-02-11 16:02:46 The moral repugnance felt by the West towards the Lukashenko regime in Belarus is not matched by policy ideas. Civil society in the West should stop tolerating cynical realpolitik and put pressure on their governments to blacklist offending officials, say http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=516 2007-02-11 16:02:35 In the negotiations that led to Beijing's selection as the host city for the 2008 Olympic Games, China made certain promises. There were, of course, the promises that the Olympic infrastructure would be adequate, that transport would work, and that the ai http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=515 2007-02-11 16:02:06 Of the seventeen presidents the United States has survived since Theodore Roosevelt declined his third term, none is so mystifying as Ronald Reagan. A New Deal Democrat until the age of fifty, he became the most revered Republican of his generation; a chi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=514 2007-02-14 12:02:47 When he was twenty-four years old, Alfred Russel Wallace, the greatest field biologist of the nineteenth century, had his head examined by a phrenologist who determined that, while his “organ of wonder” was very big, his “organ of veneration,” representin http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=513 2007-02-10 16:02:44 To his admirers, he is a islamic superstar who works hard to fill the chasm between Muslim orthodoxy and secular democracy. Young European Muslims flock to his talks, which are widely distributed on audiocassettes. A brilliant speaker, he inspires his a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=512 2007-02-06 11:02:56 The modern discussion of reference begins with the reaction of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell to an initially attractive but overly simple conception of meaning and reference. The conception is based on the observation that the most important featu http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=511 2007-02-03 12:02:50 I admire the governance structure of the Internet. I believe that libertarian conservatives, under siege from so many directions, could draw inspiration from this open, voluntary, do-it-yourself, just-in-time approach. I invite readers to participate i http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=510 2007-02-02 15:02:47 For more than a decade, Jean-Luc Marion has led us back to Husserl’s writings themselves. The shadow cast by his interpretation serves as a shade that delivers us from an earlier blindness, letting us discriminate much that lay in obscurity. He has help http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=509 2007-02-02 14:02:21 The coffee was fresh, the bacon sandwiches still warm and the talk was how to take Britain in a right-wing direction. Gathered around a giant oval red-leather table, above a shop selling priests’ robes in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, the newly conf http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=508 2007-02-02 11:02:40 Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or testing) version, at bo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=507 2007-02-01 10:02:28 Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Charles Schumer released a study arguing that New York City’s financial dominance was being eroded. But there is no more than anectodal evidence for this Kassandrian http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=506 2007-01-30 06:01:24 Holocaust denial is profoundly wrong. Therefore, it should be banned. Maybe not. Holocaust-denial laws, then, may not be the best way of dealing with the problem of Holocaust denial. In addition, they impose their own, often hidden, costs. Such laws ca http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=505 2007-01-30 05:01:10 A common factor in conventional war movies, whether they are made by Americans, Europeans, or Asians, is the lack of visible enemies. They are there, in the way Indians were there in old westerns, as fodder for the guns on our side, screaming Banzai! or A http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=504 2007-01-26 17:01:55 The history of economic thought in the twentieth century is a bit like the history of Christianity in the sixteenth century. Until John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936, economics—at least in the Engli http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=503 2007-01-26 16:01:41 In his dual biography of the two bloodiest butchers and worst moral monsters of the twentieth century, Stalin and Hitler (but is Mao not up there with them? and does Pol Pot not get a look-in?), Alan Bullock reprints side by side class photographs of youn http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=502 2007-01-26 16:01:20 It is 1949, the place is Wertach im Allgäu, and the Sebald family is out for a Sunday walk. Looking younger than his thirty-eight years, elegantly dressed and groomed, the father has gathered them together for a group picture and stares confidently http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=501 2007-01-24 16:01:37 Globalising capitalism is opposed by two major groups - the cultural nationalists in the third world, who fear the westernisation it may bring and the New Dirigistes, proponents of the “third way’” in the West who bear the ancient hatred of capitalism on http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=500 2007-01-24 15:01:26 The report of the unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitiv http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=499 2007-01-23 17:01:46 There is a moral putrescence peculiar to the denial of atrocities sanctioned by states. Yet denial’s practitioners are all around us. The Sudanese government calls the butchers of Darfur “self-defense militias.” The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=498 2007-01-23 17:01:00 Naomi Reshotko'sSocratic Virtueexamines the ethical theory espoused by the character Socrates in Plato's early dialogues. The book argues (9-14) that this ethical theory is attributable to the historical Socrates. (I suspect that no one who is skeptical o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=497 2007-01-23 11:01:25 One doesn’t think of Australia as having a culture war: indeed, as the old joke goes, one doesn’t think of Australia as having a culture at all. The internationally mourned death, from a stingray’s barb to the heart, of “crocodile hunter” Steve Irwin high http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=496 2007-01-23 08:01:42 The stereotype has been cemented in the popular culture: the hard-charging career girl who gets her comeuppance, either violently or dying a slow death by late-night memo and Chinese takeout. Think Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” and Sigourney Weaver in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=495 2007-01-22 16:01:34 The cold war may not be quite over, after all. For more than a decade, writers of thrillers and spy novels have been bedeviled by the transformation of the evocative evil empire into an oligarchic quasi-capitalist power. The world has provided other villa http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=494 2007-01-22 16:01:00 A Dirty Harry in the Culture Wars, O'Reilly is often portarayed as a pugnacious champion of the little man. How did O’Reilly, an unemployed has-been only a decade ago, turn himself into a moneymaking empire, complete with a Web site offering “Spin Stops http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=493 2007-01-20 18:01:44 In his first article for openDemocracy Hrant Dink observed that "the relationship between Turkey and the EU is governed less by reciprocal desire than by fear". His conclusion: "Do not fear". Now the sentiments that he addressed without fear have led t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=492 2007-01-20 06:01:23 To gevaltize is sometimes applied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as Aipac, the hard-line and notoriously successful pro-Israel lobby. But in the world of Jewish leaders, one man stands alone in the annals of gevalthood — Abraham Fo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=491 2007-01-19 11:01:27 CLIMBING THE MOUNTAIN SUMMARY CHAPTER 1 REASONS 1 Practical Reasons We are the animals that can understand and respond to reasons. Facts give us reasons when they count in favour of our having some belief or desire, or acting in some way. When our r http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=490 2007-01-18 17:01:46 I have said that my project in these lectures is to defend the conclusion that the argument from evil is a failure. My purpose in the present lecture is to explain what I mean by calling this argument, or any philosophical argument, a failure. Let us http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=489 2007-01-18 17:01:48 Richard Dawkins is not pleased with God: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogyni http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=488 2007-01-31 10:01:04 Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries – Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an impotent ombudsman – had paid their respec http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=487 2007-01-18 15:01:56 Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has suffered a potentially fatal blow to his authority after the country's supreme leader gave an apparent green light for MPs to attack his economic policies. In an unprecedented rebuke, 150 parliamentarians sign http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=486 2007-01-16 11:01:27 Seymour Martin Lipset, the distinguished political sociologist who died on December 31, 2006, tells the story in a memoir of how he shifted in City College (ccny) from science--as a prelude to dentistry--to sociology. During the Depression, the only membe http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=485 2007-01-15 17:01:20 The human mind has evolved to trick people into believing such notions as their personal inflation rate tends to be higher than the published figure, according to advances in behavioural economics. This branch of the dismal science attempts to explain http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=484 2007-01-15 12:01:22 WHEN Lou Reed was an undergraduate student, he wrote a poem called Heroin. Next week he will perform a song cycle entitled Berlin as part of the Festival of Sydney. This is the story of how he got from there to here. Studying for a degree in English at S http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=483 2007-01-14 07:01:59 The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=482 2007-01-15 11:01:21 One morning a few weeks ago I sat in a car talking to Rami, a thick-necked former Republican Guard commando who now procures arms for his fellow Sunni insurgents. Rami was explaining how the insurgency had changed since the first heady days after the U http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=481 2007-01-13 12:01:11 Martin Scorsese's film "The Departed" is the story of two cops as mirror-image doppelgangers. The one, William Costigan (Leonardo di Caprio), works as an informer in a Mafia organisation. The other, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), works as a policeman and in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=480 2007-01-12 15:01:07 Imagine you are looking at a uniformly colored object whose parts are differently illuminated. Perhaps it is someone’s orange shirt: he is sitting by the window, so that the upper half is brilliantly lit by direct sunshine, whereas the lower half is not http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=479 2007-01-12 14:01:28 "It is entirely possible to have a large welfare state, with generous benefits, without choking the economy," says Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic in a new series of articles, glorifying the Danish economic model. He enlists the support of several http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=478 2007-01-12 14:01:25 Anyone who has had a hand in political philosophy debates both in France and in the Anglo-American world know that they have at least since the Second World War developed in complete isolation from one another. Worse, the sense that practitioners of both http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=477 2007-01-12 14:01:51 The widening gap between the rich and middle-class Americans is undermining political support for free trade in the US, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, warned on Thursday. Tim Geithner told the Council on Foreign Relations that t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=476 2007-01-12 12:01:53 Ramen noodles are a dish of effortless purity. Like the egg, or tea, they attain a state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water. After three minutes in a yellow bath, the noodles soften. The pebbly peas and carrot chips turn practically li http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=475 2007-01-10 02:01:51 Fear of Knowledge starts out as an engaging, breezy critique of relativism and constructivism. Initial appearances prove deceptive; while Boghossian's discussion remains engaging, it quickly moves to a very high level of careful and rigorous argumentation http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=474 2007-01-09 19:01:46 I am speaking of the "Borders of Europe" in Greece, one of the "peripheral" countries of Europe in its traditional configuration--a configuration that reflects powerful myths and a long-lived series of historical events. Thessaloníki is itself at the edge http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=473 2007-01-09 19:01:31 After his embarrassing 2003 novel, “Yellow Dog” — a book that read like a parody of a Martin Amis novel, featuring gratuitous wordplay and a willfully perverse fascination with the seamy side of modern life — the author has produced what is arguably his m http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=472 2007-01-09 04:01:39 The emergence of China as a $2 trillion economy from such inauspicious beginnings only 25 years ago is such a giddy accomplishment that the temptation to see its success as proof positive of your own prejudices is overwhelming. And the west's broad prejud http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=471 2007-01-08 12:01:38 The book opens in 2004. The narrator, an old man now and an American citizen (he defected), is on a return trip to Siberia. The story of his and Lev’s camp years is thus interleaved with scenes of the new Russia. The surprise is that he finds today’s Russ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=470 2007-01-08 04:01:58 “The Wealth of Nations” revolutionized economic thought and theory when it was published in 1776. Smith’s treatise, as transformational in its own way as the American Revolution, established the intellectual foundation of capitalism, free markets and indi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=469 2007-01-07 14:01:17 Naming your child in Venezuela is an almost irresistible invitation to rebel against centuries of tradition. Politics used to influence naming, but now it’s become kind of random. Some names come to the parents in their dreams. Some rarer names which o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=468 2007-01-07 13:01:18 Suffer the little children is a phrase never far from your mind in today’s Zimbabwe. The horde of painfully thin street children milling around you at traffic lights is almost the least of it: in a population now down to 11m or less there are an estimated http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=467 2007-01-07 06:01:45 When people are trying to determine whether an entity is capable of having certain kinds of mental states, they can proceed either by thinking about the entity from a functional standpoint or by thinking about the entity from a physical standpoint. We con http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=466 2007-01-06 12:01:10 In 1933 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey, threw down a tantalising challenge to his countrymen on the 10th anniversary of the founding of the republic: "We shall raise our country to the level of the most prosperous and civilised countri http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=465 2007-01-06 08:01:04 Prepare to be asked "Who is John Galt?" this year. It is the opening line of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, whose 50th anniversary falls in 2007. The lucky ones will not know the answer: to find it they would have had to haul themselves a long way through http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=464 2007-01-06 08:01:47 Of course, vulgarity is part of the appeal of both a Jerry Bruckheimer film and a Tony Scott film, which exist purely for an evening’s entertainment, for loud noises and flashy pictures, big stars and fast action, violence and yet more violence. Like all http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=463 2007-01-06 08:01:04 One key pitfall in the philosophy of psychology is to use psychology as window dressing on what is effectively an exercise in a priori philosophy. The other major pitfall is to use philosophy as window dressing on what is effectively a review of the scien http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=462 2007-01-05 19:01:05 Why is it that amnesia patients can't remember their names or addresses, but they do remember how to hold a fork? It's because memories come in many flavors, says Fred Helmstetter, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee (UWM). R http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=461 2007-01-05 14:01:53 ... for whosoever would take upon him to choose and to alter, usurps the authority of judging, and should look well about him, and make it his business to discern clearly the defect of what he would abolish, and the virtue of what he is about to introduce http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=460 2007-01-05 13:01:31 What do you think about the possibility of philosophy playing a more active role in public life, education, applied ethics, and so on? Martha Nussbaum: There are many possibilities. And countries are very different. I find that the US is in a way one o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=459 2007-01-05 12:01:27 Royal Navy commanders were in uproar yesterday after it was revealed that almost half of the Fleet's 44 warships are to be mothballed as part of a Ministry of Defence cost-cutting measure. Senior officers have said the plans will turn Britain's once-pr http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=458 2007-01-05 08:01:56 We have recently witnessed a flurry of comment in the US on the long-running stagnation of wages. Many believe that the future livelihood of the “middle class” is also at risk. Lou Dobbs of CNN, the labour groups’ think-tank Economic Policy Institute and http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=457 2007-01-05 05:01:06 The movies represent a zone of mystery and cultural initiation: “it’s true that fresh air is good for the body,” Frank O'Hara writes in his 1960 poem, “but what about the soul/that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images”?At their best, movies not o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=456 2007-01-05 02:01:23 The problem with today’s America is not that it is a new global empire, but that it is not one. That is, while pretending to be an empire, it continues to act like a nation-state. It is as if the guiding vision of recent American politics is a weird rever http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=455 2007-01-05 01:01:17 If you ever wondered how politicians invariably manage to mess up rural policy, there were two of them to give a master class at this year's Oxford Farming Conference. Both farm minister David Miliband and Tory leader David Cameron showed up at the ann http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=454 2007-01-04 17:01:42 Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. A look at why the tough guys win more than they should. National leaders get all http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=453 2007-01-04 16:01:04 A book published in 2002 contains a puzzle that everyone should know. Suppose you go to your doctor for a check-up and agree to a routine test for a particular disease. You are tested and, alarmingly, it comes back positive. You ask the doctor what this m http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=452 2007-01-04 15:01:34 Most people think that the bungled invasion of Iraq, climaxing last week with the bungled execution-assassination of Saddam Hussein, will go down in history as the ultimate symbol of the Bush Administration’s hubris and incompetence. They should think aga http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=451 2007-01-04 11:01:48 As someone who has been involved in distance learning at The Open University for the past fifteen years or so, most recently helping to design the Start Writing courses there which are first level writing courses taught entirely online, I take very seri http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=450 2007-01-03 15:01:50 Our Short National Nightmare. How President Ford managed to go soft on Iraqi Baathists, Indonesian fascists, Soviet Communists, and the shah … in just two years. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=449 2007-01-03 15:01:22 Twelve general elections were held in Latin America and the Caribbean in the last 12 months, if we exclude Guyana, which belongs to the English-speaking club, and we include Haiti, an ambidextrous French-speaking country that sometimes sides with the Lati http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=448 2007-01-05 05:01:30 [Registration required]Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he'd take his oath of office on the Koran -- especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=447 2007-01-03 14:01:08 [Registration required]A legislative commission recommended on Tuesday that New Jersey become the first state to abolish the death penalty since states began reinstating their capital punishment laws 35 years ago. Its report found “no compelling evidence” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=446 2007-01-03 08:01:35 Migrants are playing a vital part in overcoming one of the biggest barriers to business expansion by making up for a shortage of skilled workers, employers say. The comments from the CBI, based on a survey of the London job market, contradict claims b http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=445 2007-01-03 08:01:19 Amid all the excitement about the Democrats gaining control of Congress in the November elections, one big election result was largely ignored. Although it illuminated the flaws of America's political system, it also restored my belief in the compassion o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=444 2007-01-03 07:01:05 Chirac spoke as expected and left his own side feeling more queasy than ever. We are in a bizarre situation. The governing UMP party began today to endorse Nicolas Sarkozy as its candidate for the elections and yet they do not know whether or not their Pr http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=443 2007-01-03 07:01:24 As mayor of Jerusalem for 28 years from 1965, 26 of those as mayor of the physically unified city after the Six-Day War, Teddy Kollek strove for tolerant coexistence for the city’s inhabitants of all races and creeds. In this period sources of conflict in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=442 2007-01-03 06:01:30 I’m so optimistic that I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion. I think that in about twenty-five years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion wi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=441 2007-01-02 14:01:59 Sharp polarities between clashing points of view are wreaking all sorts of havoc in the world right now. Perhaps for many of us the divide that cuts closest to the quick is that between science, reason, and logic, on the one hand, and sectarianism, faith, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=440 2007-01-02 13:01:39 The world is watching Ethiopia's war with the totalitarian Islamist regime in Somalia. The world should also start paying attention to the campaign of genocide which the Ethiopian government has been waging against its own people, in southwestern Ethiopia http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=439 2007-01-02 12:01:17 When Tony Blair first outlined his "doctrine of international community" as a justification for pre-emptive military intervention in April 1999, it came as a complete surprise to the Foreign Office. It is safe to assume it was as much of a surprise to the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=438 2007-01-02 10:01:18 A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and comp http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=437 2007-01-02 08:01:55 The execution of Saddam Hussein – widely condemned yesterday as more an exercise in lynch law than judicial punishment – was rushed through by the Iraqi government despite American requests for a delay. A senior Iraqi source said the US ambassador in Bag http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=436 2007-01-02 08:01:14 "Look, everybody’s trying to write the history of this administration even before it’s over. I’m reading about George Washington still. My attitude is, if they’re still analyzing No. 1, 43 ought not to worry about it, and just do what he thinks is rig http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=435 2007-01-01 16:01:56 President Paul Kagame has said that African countries should rise up in unison and resist Western arrogance and meddling in the internal affairs of African countries. Kagame, who was speaking to a team of visiting Ivorian journalists at Hotel Intercontine http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=434 2007-01-01 11:01:45 French presidential frontrunners Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy issued New Year greetings via the Internet on Monday in contrasting styles that spoke volumes about their different approach to the campaign. While Interior Minister Sarkozy offered a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=433 2007-01-01 11:01:00 You can't beat a good hanging, eh? Ever since the first indications that Saddam Hussein would be hanged "sooner rather than later", the civilised world has taken on the aspect of an over-excited dog making love to a cushion. He's had his possessions sent http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=432 2007-01-01 10:01:24 Talk of distributing movies over the Internet has been around for years, but it has sharpened in recent months as Hollywood has run into financial trouble. In the middle of the summer, the studios were clearly undergoing a contraction and what some even c http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=431 2007-01-01 09:01:36 Chávez’s anti-Americanism is central to his global appeal, while American consumers and companies are central to the economic performance of his regime. So, while he’s going around the world giving speeches about how the goose should be killed, he relies http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=430 2007-01-01 06:01:22 The latest opinion poll in Scotland shows a slim majority, 51 per cent, now supporting independence. No need to get too excited, perhaps. We have been here before. The last time was in 1998, when the imminent resurrection of the parliament in Edinburgh br http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=429 2006-12-31 13:12:53 For many observers, it was the moment when demands for public acceptance of the niqab went too far. Earlier this week, Channel 4's Christmas message was delivered by a veiled woman, a Muslim convert, who criticised the Leader of the House, Jack Straw. It http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=428 2006-12-31 11:12:30 The Royal Air Force has called in a gay pressure group to help solve its recruitment crisis. The Service will take advice from Stonewall on how to make itself more attractive to homosexual and bisexual men and women, and is aiming to spend tens of thousan http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=427 2006-12-31 11:12:56 SADDAM HUSSEIN met his death on the scaffold in Baghdad yesterday with fortitude and calm. It was an extraordinary, melodramatic end to a life of confrontation and defiance — a final performance to launch himself as a martyr. Having reported on Saddam http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=426 2006-12-31 08:12:53 How should a democracy be judged? Some argue that the freedom of the press is the determining issue; others, the probity of its politicians; others again, its citizens' happiness. Well, here's another suggestion. It has not, to my knowledge, been much con http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=425 2006-12-30 20:12:21 Venezuela's socialist president, Hugo Chavez, yesterday announced he was to close the country's oldest television channel for being critical of his regime. Dressed in army fatigues like his mentor, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Mr Chavez said he would not be r http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=424 2006-12-30 17:12:42 The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was executed this morning at the age of 69, may not yield many general biographies - he was personally too uninteresting for that - but he will be a case study for political scientists for years to come. For he was t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=423 2006-12-30 08:12:06 Except the stock market, optimistic predictions took a beating in 2006, but my 33rd annual office pool in this space is my chance to recoup. In these multiple choices, pick one, all or none. Scientific news will be in (a) neuro-circuitry; (b) deep brain http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=422 2006-12-29 01:12:40 If nothing else, pink and Princess have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened. The freedoms feminism bestowed came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves: losing male love, never marrying, not having childr http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=421 2006-12-28 13:12:58 The Bush administration could be forced to limit carbon dioxide emissions after proposing to list the polar bear as an endangered species because of the threat from global warming. Once a species is listed as being threatened, a government is prevent http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=420 2006-12-28 12:12:27 Somali government troops entered Mogadishu unopposed today, hours after an Islamist movement that tried to establish a government based on Sharia law abandoned the capital. The retreat of Somalia Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC) fighters was followed b http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=419 2006-12-28 12:12:47 When Republicans expanded their majority in 2004, their first target was the trial lawyers, virtual ATM dispensers for Democratic candidates. A new law curbing class-action lawsuits was on the president's desk by mid-February. Now, Democrats are target http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=418 2006-12-27 18:12:10 After defeating fascists and communists, can the West now defeat the Islamists? On the face of it, its military preponderance makes victory seem inevitable. Even were Teheran to acquire a nuclear weapon, Islamists have nothing like the military machine th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=416 2006-12-27 18:12:00 Though 98% Muslim and without a functioning government, Somalia was doing ok. It recently became the site of a regional war. The combatants are Somalia's secular Government and the "Islamic Courts Union" which is backed by the usual suspects of the terror http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=415 2006-12-27 03:12:50 Anyone who doubted the wisdom of releasing British anti-Semite David Irving from an Austrian jail and converting the remaining two years of his original sentence for Holocaust denial to probation did not have to wait very long for proof that last week's d http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=414 2006-12-26 19:12:03 From feelings to words People can often feel that something is right or wrong about a situation without being able to verbalise it. They cannot find the concepts to describe their thoughts, and the words to express them. Many in Fiji are now feeling t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=413 2006-12-26 19:12:03 The film itself is only gently amusing, often lacking comic timing and relying on Diaz’s trademark high-heeled pratfalls and Winslet’s lovelorn ‘Bridget Jones’-style routine. Some charming moments come courtesy of the friendship between Iris (Winslet) and http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=412 2006-12-26 16:12:37 Despite its similarities with manufacturing, assisted reproduction is unlike most technologies in one way: as the science advances, the market may shrink. Most women in need of egg donation have left childbearing too late to use their own—but once eggs ca http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=411 2006-12-26 12:12:27 [FactsAndIdeas does NOT endorse the Views in the Linked article.] The Associated Press is one of the world’s oldest and biggest global news agencies. It was established in 1847. It still has 80 offices around the world and supplies close to 500 news cent http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=410 2006-12-26 12:12:14 Pentecostalism is wonderfully innovative. What other Christian movement can produce churches with names like the Mountain of Miracles and the Church of Christ's Spit? And what other religious movement can produce “hallelujah robotics”—a sort of frenzied d http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=409 2006-12-26 11:12:42 Guevara is not just a dead white guy from a well-to-do family who terrorized a racially mixed nation. He is also a symbol of the totalitarian regime that persists in Cuba, which still practices his ideology of intolerance, hatred and repression. It is not http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=408 2006-12-25 02:12:31 Kirkpatrick saw no need to compromise or conciliate on anything, but instead came out furiously fighting against the “expansionist” Soviet Union and its client states. “There is...only one revolutionary society in the contemporary world,” she cried in 198 http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=407 2006-12-24 15:12:35 The indulgent wealth that surrounds Bill and Hillary is corrupting. And that corruption--of taste, of moderation, of what is essential--cripples the soul and distorts life itself. Gore and Tipper have musician friends and professor friends and artist frie http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=406 2006-12-24 09:12:00 “The Holiday” is a tale of two women, two houses, two love interests — Jude Law pairs with Ms. Diaz, Jack Black gets lucky with Ms. Winslet — but it’s also about movie love. There is something touching if willfully naïve about Ms. Meyers’s nostalgia for H http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=405 2006-12-24 09:12:13 Turkey’s membership in the European Union would strengthen Armenia’s national security and bring the South Caucasus nation “geopolitically closer to Europe,” Defense Minister Serzh Sarkisian said in a newspaper article published on Friday. Writing in “ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=404 2006-12-23 09:12:33 Even the closest couples can fall out over money. But when one is a presidential candidate and the other her party leader, such differences can threaten more than a romantic relationship. So Ségolène Royal, Socialist candidate for the French presidency http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=403 2006-12-23 09:12:03 At a time when humans everywhere are expressing their faith in the divine, it is perhaps worth remembering that it is not only religion where blind unreason can sometimes hold sway. In various parts of the world today, politicians are revered and regimes http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=402 2006-12-23 08:12:35 President Putin could have held a discreet secret policemen’s ball to honour Russia’s security services, given the suspicion heaped on their agents over the killing of Alexander Litvinenko. But far from a cloak-and-dagger affair, Mr Putin flaunted the res http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=401 2006-12-23 08:12:03 The Kremlin has opened a new front in its increasingly bitter diplomatic row with London by disrupting the activities of the British Council in Moscow. More than 1,500 students have been offered refunds after the British Council was forced to close a l http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=400 2006-12-23 08:12:07 I met Fidel Castro in Havana in 1995 as part of a human rights delegation and, after six gruelling hours of negotiation, gained his commitment to release six political prisoners. We were hardly the first or last visitors to do so. Jesse Jackson convinced http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=399 2006-12-23 08:12:03 The recently deceased Chilean autocrat Augusto Pinochet is responsible for banning political opposition, “disappearing” political enemies (and blowing some of them up in Washington, D.C.), ordering many thousands of deaths, and turning football stadiums i http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=398 2006-12-21 16:12:06 The smell of an odor is not merely a result of chemical detection but is also influenced by what the smeller learns about the odor. Now, researchers have discovered how such "perceptual learning" about an odor influences processing of information from the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=397 2006-12-23 09:12:53 The Russian and French gas monopolies, Gazprom and Gaz de France (GdF), have agreed a new contract to supply Russian gas to France, in return for giving the Russian company a slice of the French distribution market. The deal cements Gazprom’s position in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=396 2006-12-21 15:12:41 Two years before my father died, he gave me a small suitcase filled with his manuscripts and notebooks. Assuming his usual jocular, mocking air, he told me that he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after his death. “Just take a l http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=395 2006-12-20 17:12:32 Bashir Assad, the President of Syria, has repeatedly offered peace talks with Israel. Most recently he has added that he has no preconditions for negotiations — he is not even demanding that Israel promise in advance to return the Golan Heights. The respo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=394 2006-12-20 16:12:40 The vast literature on distributive justice produced in the last decades is mainly concerned with issues such as the proper definition of what is distributive justice, what should be the proper metric of justice and what are the best institutional arrange http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=393 2006-12-20 15:12:14 (Registration required)When the Iraq Study Group report used its banner recommendation last week to suggest dialogue with Syria, politicians and pundits rushed to agree. "Dialogue is an important thing. It's very hard to move the ball if you don't know fi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=392 2006-12-19 13:12:24 My low point with the Republican Party came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In attempting to deliver benefits to victims, the administration found men and women who had never had a bank account; families entirely disconnected from the mainstream ec http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=391 2006-12-18 16:12:17 As Saddam Hussein 's execution may be getting closer, the bloody chaos in Iraq is still getting worse and the flaws of his first trial have been getting more attention.1 It is not surprising that critics have been pointing to a "demonization" of the defen http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=390 2006-12-18 15:12:07 The death of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte marks the definitive end of his efforts to associate himself with conservatism. It also marks the ultimate success of his efforts to avoid accountability for his murderous behavior as a leader of the Chilean military j http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=389 2006-12-18 15:12:25 Ségolène Royal, the French Socialist presidential candidate, postponed a "triumphant" US tour planned for this week after Hillary Clinton declined to meet her, it was claimed yesterday. Miss Royal, the first Frenchwoman with a realistic chance of becom http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=387 2006-12-18 12:12:34 The Polish plumber is the butt of jokes throughout Europe, and even the Polish tourist board has made use of the cliché. However, in the UK, which until now has not put a limit on the number of work permits for members of new EU member states but will beg http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=386 2006-12-18 11:12:14 Of all the temptations of journalism, prediction is the most dangerous. Soothsayers in our trade are usually made to look foolish by events. The best answer was given by the fabled correspondent in some distant spot who, asked by an importunate foreign de http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=385 2006-12-18 11:12:18 What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professe http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=384 2006-12-17 14:12:46 For the past few years, the dictators and terrorists have been gaining ground, and with good reason. The deepening catastrophe in Iraq has distracted the world's sole superpower from its true goals, and weakened the U.S. politically as well as militarily. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=383 2006-12-17 07:12:29 There is a more complex dynamic to this than civil war. There is Shia versus Shia, Sunni versus Sunni, Shia versus Sunni as well as militias against the authority of the elected government. Many act as the proxies of regional powers, so you can call it a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=382 2006-12-17 04:12:34 The Darwin Principle basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=381 2006-12-17 04:12:53 One of Russia’s most effective civil society movements came to prominence fighting for the most zealously guarded privilege in the far eastern region: ownership of a right-hand drive car. The grass-roots movement, known as Freedom of Choice, began last http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=380 2006-12-16 17:12:36 The Augusto Pinochet saga is probably far from over -- Latin American politics is one big room filled with ghosts from the past -- but the death of the Chilean dictator at least gives us a chance to recapitulate the most important lessons from his country http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=379 2006-12-16 17:12:42 Libertarian Party candidates may have cost Sens. Jim Talent and Conrad Burns their seats, tipping the Senate to Democratic control. In Montana, the Libertarian candidate got more than 10,000 votes, or 3 percent, while Democrat Jon Tester edged Burns by fe http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=378 2006-12-16 16:12:48 There have been many such signs, from barbarity in the north Caucasus to harassment of foreign oil firms and meddlesome foreign policy. But perhaps none has publicised the murk and cruelty of life in Russia so effectively as the mysterious death of an uni http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=377 2006-12-16 05:12:24 Dozens of Iranian students burnt pictures of President Ahmadinejad and chanted “Death to the dictator” as he gave a speech at a university in Tehran yesterday. Never has the hardline leader faced such open hostility at a public event, which came as Ira http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=376 2006-12-15 21:12:36 Segolene Royal has won the Socialist Party nomination to run for President in 2007 and polls suggest she would likely win. Royal this week won the endorsement of more than 60 percent of the party, avoiding a second ballot in the race for the Socialist http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=375 2006-12-15 20:12:24 J. Angelo Corlett's purpose in this book is to set forth and defend a neo-Kantian variety of retributivism against critics of all stripes. He writes with an incisive and at times polemical voice, designed to add particular emphasis to the force of his co http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=374 2006-12-15 20:12:34 It's not every day that conservative lawyers Steven Calabresi and Richard A. Epstein agree with Clinton administration Attorney General Janet Reno or former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Burt Neuborne. Yet the conservatives joined their outspok http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=373 2006-12-15 20:12:17 ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, A Frenchman, is America's Adam Smith. Appropriated by Democrats and Republicans in much the way Smith has been by Margaret Thatcher and, most recently, Gordon Brown, de Tocqueville has such wide appeal because of the protean quality http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=372 2006-12-15 20:12:44 The libertarian movement appears close to suing conservatives for divorce. The vaunted "fusion" between liberty-oriented and virtue-oriented conservatives that helped propel Ronald Reagan into the presidency is breaking down. If Republicans are going to s http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=371 2006-12-15 20:12:15 France owes the world an explanation as to why it has refused to bring to justice the late Juvenal Habyarimana's wife Agathe, for her role in the 1994 Genocide. Justice Minister, Tharcisse Karugarama said that twelve years after the genocide. France ha http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=370 2006-12-15 21:12:26 Hizbullah's ability to draw hundreds of thousands of Shiites to central Beirut to rally against the Lebanese government is the most visible evidence that the militants are now the undisputed representative of the country's Shiite community. Yet some of http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=369 2006-12-15 19:12:04 Tony Blair on Friday defended the government’s decision to halt a Serious Fraud Office inquiry into bribery allegations against BAE Systems, saying he took full responsibility for the move. The prime minister, speaking to reporters in Brussels, said th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=368 2006-12-15 19:12:12 The Government's case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for milita http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=367 2006-12-15 19:12:07 “Little Children,” Todd Field’s superb film adaptation of the novel by Tom Perrotta, begins in a clean and leafy suburban playground, where toddlers cavort under the watchful, benevolent gazes of their pretty young mothers. This may strike you as a rare t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=366 2006-12-15 14:12:16 The last Paris tram ground to a halt 60 years ago. Now a new tram line is being introduced with lots of fanfare. France hopes this return to the past will ring in a new era of urban mobility. The tram is quiet, fast and comfortable -- a perfect remedy for http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=365 2006-12-15 02:12:00 The Economist picks its list of the books of the year 2006 in history, politics, science, business, biography, memoir or fiction. The books in the list are linked to lengthy reviews publish during the year. Alexis de Tocqueville's strong views on demago http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=364 2006-12-15 02:12:22 “Stranger Than Fiction” gives Will Ferrell the kind of opportunity that movie and television clowns seem to cherish, which is to impress audiences with their restraint. Robin Williams does it every now and then, as does Jim Carrey — Bill Murray does nothi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=363 2006-12-15 01:12:28 "The Importance of Herder," as the title of Charles Taylor's 1991 essay declares, requires long overdue consideration. Recent English-language scholarship by Frederick Beiser, John Zammito, and Michael Forster has added to German-language landmarks by Rud http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=362 2006-12-14 17:12:50 Questions regarding the nature of of moral judgement loom large in moral philosophy. Perhaps the most basic of these questions ask how, exactly, moral judgments and moral rules are to be defined; what features distinguish them from other sorts of rules a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=361 2006-12-14 16:12:35 In Taskent memories are as long as the shadows cast by the cypress trees scattered across the hillside. And Suat Kadafar has probably the longest and most painful of all. In August 1974, when he was 19, Greek Cypriot gunmen rounded him up along with 8 http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=360 2006-12-14 12:12:39 Faced with popular opposition to Turkish membership, the European Union is set to tighten conditions for entry at its summit in Brussels, which opens today. "The better the EU member states are prepared, the smoother the EU functions after enlargement," O http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=359 2006-12-14 12:12:16 Mr Kevorkian has aspirations for establishing a series of euthanasia clinics, which he called "obitoria." These euthanasia clinics were to be staffed by physician-killers who would be legally permitted to terminate people who requested death. Kevorkian fo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=358 2006-12-14 09:12:41 The leader of the biggest Christian faction in Lebanon, General Michel Aoun, who has formed an alliance with the militant Shia group Hizbullah, said their opposition movement was prepared to set up their own national unity administration if the western-ba http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=357 2006-12-13 12:12:22 Ségolène Royal’s rise to power on a swish and a smile has been spotlighted in some quarters of English-language media—the NY Times for example—charmed by her charm, impressed by her gender and, perhaps, relieved to have something good to say about a Frenc http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=356 2006-12-12 19:12:13 France armed and trained radical militia blamed for most of the killings in Rwanda's 1994 genocide, said two ex-soldiers. The Rwandan soldiers were speaking to a panel probing alleged French complicity in the massacres. As the government-appointed inqu http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=355 2006-12-12 19:12:13 The Virtuous Life in Greek Ethics will be of possible interest to two overlapping audiences: those who want to make sense of the ethical writings of the philosophers of ancient Greece, especially Plato and Aristotle, and those who are invested in the ong http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=354 2006-12-12 19:12:25 Vision of a Liberal Europe Speech by Sir Menzies Campbell MP 12 December 2006 Few matters are more fundamental to Britain’s interests than our position within the European Union. But Britain’s relationship with Europe has always been marre http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=353 2006-12-12 19:12:18 Teens smoke, take drugs, have unprotected sex and ride with drunk drivers, not because they think they are invulnerable or haven't thought about the risks, says a new Cornell study. Ads by Google Advertise on this site Adult Aftercare Program Transi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=352 2006-12-12 18:12:00 Twenty-two parties recently signed a document making proposals for Armenia's electoral code, to broaden women's access to politics. It suggests a 25 percent quota for women in party lists, up from the current provision of only 3 percent. But the chances o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=351 2006-12-12 18:12:54 Few coups in Latin America have received so much international attention as that of Chile in September 1973. Condemnation of Augusto Pinochet and his regime was almost universal (the United States of America of Richard M Nixon and Henry Kissinger was an e http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=350 2006-12-12 19:12:49 A new exhibition opening at Istanbul's Sabanci Museum Thursday features rare vestiges of an empire of one of history's most feared warriors, Ghengis Khan. "Genghis Khan and his Heirs - The Great Mongolian Empire", will display nearly 600 works of art, ei http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=349 2006-12-13 11:12:03 An oft-heard claim hovers at the horizon of our thoughts, pronouncing that everything is political [tout est politique]. The claim can be proffered or received in several different ways: on certain occasions, according to a thought of distribution (the mo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=348 2006-12-12 18:12:16 Writing in an issue of Critique & Humanism on social philosopher Axel Honneth, Alexander Kiossev argues that Honneth omits an analysis of social stigmatization at a pre-discursive level – that of the gaze and perception. Minimal recognition of distinction http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=347 2006-12-12 18:12:45 INTERVIEWER: So you envisaged, therefore, that the free markets ultimately would undermine Pinochet? MILTON FRIEDMAN: Oh, absolutely. The emphasis of that talk was that free markets would undermine political centralization and political control. INT http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=346 2006-12-12 17:12:44 The bipartisan Iran Study Group's recommendations for an overhaul of United States policy in the middle east seem to have produced a sceptical response in the White House. A day after the report (released on 6 December 2006) described the situation in Ira http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=345 2006-12-12 16:12:35 Though General Pinochet became a devil symbol of the international left, he was a far more complex figure and cannot be understood apart from the global Cold War conflict of which he and his country were a part. Pinochet's legacy is a paradox--a long stri http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=344 2006-12-12 02:12:02 This lively and accessible book is an "exercise in critical philosophy, focusing on the concept of rights" (xi). It is part of the series, Routledge Contemporary Political Philosophy, and is addressed to undergraduate students of political philosophy, law http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=343 2006-12-11 13:12:24 Is it possible that, like Howard Dean before her, Segolene Royal derives her success in part from a successfull application of peer-to-peer based web strategies? After hearing Benoit Thieulin, Segolene’s internet strategist, speak at a fringe meeting o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=342 2006-12-11 12:12:50 The French system of assimilation was effective so long as it was concerned with creating a homogenous population whose members would have lifetime job security. However, the assimilation model is no longer appropriate for the contemporary situation, henc http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=341 2006-12-11 12:12:56 Many North Koreans are now aware of the poverty of their country and are voicing discontent after years of near-starvation, according to the fullest study yet conducted of refugees from the Stalinist dictatorship. While the popular image of North Korea http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=340 2006-12-11 12:12:10 We know that they sing, sending musical waves through the deep as they travel in complex family units. We know that they appear stricken with grief when one of them dies. And now we know that the great whales of the world are capable of loving. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=339 2006-12-11 12:12:29 General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile who died yesterday aged 91, saved his country from Communism and created the most successful economy in Latin America; he was also responsible, however, for the widespread torture and murder of his po http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=338 2006-12-11 11:12:30 For 43 years, Turkey has been knocking at the European Union’s door. Despite being the guardian of Nato’s southern flank, firmly aligned with the West throughout the Cold War, it has watched other states with dictatorial pasts and fragile economies — Spai http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=337 2006-12-11 10:12:03 An outspoken Palestinian lawyer was hoping to challenge Holocaust deniers during a provocative conference that opens in Iran today. The international gathering will question whether six million Jews were actually slaughtered by the Nazis in the Second Wo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=336 2006-12-11 10:12:13 European governments have again defied pressure to cut state aid payments to the private sector, according to a report showing they spent a total of €64bn (£43bn) on subsidies last year. The latest figures, to be revealed by the European Commission on http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=335 2006-12-11 09:12:55 The letters — from heavyweights like Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and, in an unusual gesture for a man who shuns publicity, Thomas Pynchon — were published here on Wednesday in The Daily Telegraph, which reported http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=334 2006-12-11 06:12:27 Depending on your views of what the word authorship means, novelist Ian McEwan either plagiarized, copied, borrowed from, looted, was inspired by, drew from, or relied on No Time for Romance, the 1977 memoir of novelist Lucilla Andrews, for his best-selli http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=333 2006-12-11 05:12:31 “Apocalypto” is a pathological work of art. It is neither gratuitous nor casual; Gibson is not trying out an idea or testing a visual manner, he is trying to reach to the guts of the story. That is the thing about Gibson, fool that he is in other ways: he http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=332 2006-12-11 05:12:10 Litvinenko’s slow and agonizing death from ingestion of polonium 210 is an act of terrorism. Its grisly exoticism seemed almost a throwback to the ruthlessness of the Stalin era, when it was part of the code of the K.G.B. to kill its apostates where it fo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=331 2006-12-11 03:12:30 Natural selection argues against cooperation. If all organisms, including humans, are pitted in a ceaseless struggle for survival and sex, those who help others would quickly find themselves swamped in a rising tide of selfishness, especially if those the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=330 2006-12-10 20:12:37 Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has come under attack for his views on the Holocaust from an unexpected quarter - a Palestinian activist recently freed after 18 years in an Israeli jail. Mr Ahmadinejad was widely reviled in the West last year fo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=329 2006-12-10 20:12:57 In recent years I have spent time visiting hard-pressed communities across Britain, hearing first hand about the problems people face. Broken and dysfunctional homes which too often leave their children with poor life chances, sliding into violent street http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=328 2006-12-11 06:12:01 n China under Mao Tse-tung the families of condemned men were forced to pay for the bullet that would kill their father or their son. I was reminded of that exquisite little cruelty by the government’s confession last Monday that the bereaved families of http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=327 2006-12-10 15:12:28 Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal won a boost to her campaign to unseat France's ruling conservatives by securing the backing of a key rival leftist Sunday. Jean-Pierre Chevenement, a former defense minister who won 5.3 percent of the vot http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=326 2006-12-10 15:12:54 The film is based on Marianne Pearl’s (played by Angelina Jolie) book about her husband, Daniel Pearl (played by Brad Pitt), the South Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal who in January 2002 was kidnapped by jihadis in Pakistan and eventually beh http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=325 2006-12-10 13:12:32 It is becoming clear that the first 21st century clash of civilisations – if there is to be one – will not pit Christians against Muslims but one branch of Islam against another. In yet another escalation of the Middle East crisis sparked by the disastrou http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=324 2006-12-10 07:12:52 From the beginning, Turkey's path to the European Union was a diplomatic minefield, with any number of issues threatening to blow up at any time. The country is large, 99 percent Muslim, prone to military coups and economic crises, and developed to Eur http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=321 2006-12-10 07:12:33 If you pray for a member of your congregation to get better and she dies, your prayer was not answered. To retort that God's mysterious way of answering your prayer--"but God needed her by his side in heaven, that's why he let her die"--might involve not http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=320 2006-12-10 04:12:06 De Botton, a young author of briskly selling meditations on such themes as status anxiety, travel and the life-changing power of Proust, here turns his attention to architecture, pondering the question of just what are the elusive qualities that make one http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=319 2006-12-10 02:12:06 After being introduced as "the next French president" by her Portuguese socialist hosts Segolene Royal said she would work to relaunch the European Constitution if elected. The French presidential candidate was the guest of honour at the annual conference http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=318 2006-12-09 16:12:48 What, then, was his secret? Was it a silver tongue that no woman could resist? Was it his outlaw reputation and his celebrated good looks? His ability to let frustrated women express their sexuality in an oppressive society? Or was he just really well hun http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=317 2006-12-09 15:12:38 From the top of Turkey's tallest building, the panorama over Istanbul is stunning. The huge city sprawls and crawls over a thousand hills and ravines. The Bosphorus, separating Europe from Asia, threads north to the Black Sea. To the south, beyond the dom http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=316 2006-12-09 14:12:07 The Russian authorities yesterday stood accused of orchestrating a campaign of intimidation against British interests in Moscow, where the ambassador has been harassed and the BBC Russian Service mysteriously taken off air. With ties between the Kremli http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=315 2006-12-10 07:12:33 One of Britain’s highest earning barristers and his wife have been accused of swindling millions of dollars from the Sultan of Brunei’s brother. Thomas Derbyshire and Faith Zaman are said to have plundered Prince Jefri’s fortune to buy themselves two C http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=314 2006-12-09 13:12:14 On Nov. 1, the day Mr. Litvinenko is believed to have been poisoned, Mario Scaramella and the former spy met at a sushi bar in London. Mr. Scaramella first claimed to have been hit with five times the lethal dose of polonium 210, the radioactive substance http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=313 2006-12-09 13:12:25 A sex-for-jobs scandal bedevilling a coalition partner of Poland's ruling Law and Justice party has threatened to destabilise the government and prompted the leading opposition party, Civic Platform, to call for early elections next spring. The rural p http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=312 2006-12-09 13:12:25 Hugo Chávez’s sweeping victory in the Venezuelan presidential election this week could help to ensure political cover and economic support for the emerging leadership in Cuba as Fidel Castro fights for his life somewhere in Havana. “As long as oil pric http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=311 2006-12-09 13:12:30 One of the iconic images of European diplomacy in recent years shows Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, glad-handing his way through a meeting of European Union leaders in Brussels. It is December 2004 and the EU has just agreed to open a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=310 2006-12-09 12:12:38 France and Germany have joined forces to block a radical shake-up of Europe’s energy market – a move that will prevent some of the region’s biggest power companies being broken up. José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, has been told that http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=309 2006-12-09 12:12:07 If ever actress and role were meant for one another it’s Reese Witherspoon and Becky Sharp, the self-seeking charmer from Thackeray’s 1847 social satire. Now here she is in full regency fig with a ‘Who’s Who’ of the British acting profession, and the resu http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=308 2006-12-09 08:12:21 Where “Saving Private Ryan” offers technique, Clint Eastwood’s film suggests metaphysics. It insists, with a moral certitude that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country neede http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=307 2006-12-09 07:12:19 Some Europeans are echoing two broader concerns that tend to animate America's religious right: alarm about the increasing secularisation of society and rejection of almost everything to do with the 1960s. In Britain, the head of the Anglican church frets http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=306 2006-12-09 03:12:32 Has the supermarket trolley dethroned the ballot box? Voter turnout in most developed countries has fallen in recent decades, but sales of organic, Fairtrade and local food—each with its own political agenda—are growing fast. Such food allows shoppers to http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=305 2006-12-09 03:12:14 French presidential candidate Segolene Royal said Friday that the world must not close its eyes to the potential danger of Iran, reiterating her position that Tehran should not have access to civilian nuclear power. Refusing to step back from her much http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=304 2006-12-08 18:12:24 A street is named after her. Back-to-back conferences celebrate her. New books champion her. Hannah Arendt, who was born 100 years ago this past October, has joined the small world of philosophical heroes. Nor has this attention come to her only since her http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=303 2006-12-08 16:12:27 The Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, today said his Hamas-led government will never recognise Israel and will continue to fight for the liberation of Jerusalem. "We will never recognise the usurper Zionist government and will continue our ji http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=302 2006-12-08 13:12:50 Plans to withhold grants to religious and racial groups were announced by the Prime Minister today as part of a programme to ensure Muslims and other minorities intergrate into British society. In a speech on multi-culturism Mr Blair said he also wante http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=301 2006-12-08 12:12:32 Tony Snow is a vast improvement on his two predecessors as White House press secretary, both Republican Party lackeys. It is not clear how much he is in the policy-making loop, but at least he knows the policy options, can think on his feet and is not afr http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=300 2006-12-08 12:12:46 Sweden's new centre right government has held a meeting with financial industry experts to discuss how to transform Stockholm into a northern European financial centre. Mats Odell, minister for financial markets, said moves by exchanges in Europe and t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=299 2006-12-08 12:12:08 It was shortly after Anthony Brenton, Britain's ambassador to Moscow, spoke about the challenges to freedom in Russia that a young blond man thrust himself forward and started to yell at the top of his voice: "Brenton, apologise!" The stunt this week a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=298 2006-12-08 12:12:16 Neither Mr. Gibson’s fans nor his detractors are likely to accuse him of excessive subtlety, and the effectiveness of “Apocalypto” is inseparable from its crudity. But the blunt characterizations and the emphatic emotional cues are also evidence of the di http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=297 2006-12-08 11:12:25 Gordon Brown has raised taxes by £6bn a year since the 2005 general election, finally facing up to weaknesses in the public finances that could have been ­predicted, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said on Thursday. The tightness of the government’s b http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=296 2006-12-08 11:12:07 By now, Mohammed Yunus's first loan--$27 from his pocket to a group of bamboo furniture makers in a Bangladeshi village--is a legend in the international aid community. Inspired by the results of his modest 1974 experiment, Yunus, an economist, went on to http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=295 2006-12-07 16:12:00 It was not until a year and a half after his voyage on board the Beagle that Charles Darwin first came face to face with an ape. He was standing by the giraffe house at the London Zoo on a warm day in late March of 1838. The zoo had just acquired an orang http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=294 2006-12-07 16:12:35 Chris Wiggins, an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University, offers this explanation. A patient goes to see a doctor. The doctor performs a test with 99 percent reliability--that is, 99 percent of people who are sick test positi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=293 2006-12-07 15:12:16 Perhaps ‘medical anthropology’ has not yet become a household term. Although anthropologists still go to Papua New Guinea, Mayotte, or the headwaters of the Amazon, many now work closer to home, on the border between Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, or in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=292 2006-12-07 15:12:46 By a nifty piece of diplomatic footwork Turkey has today shown that it has picked up a few tips from Britain, its greatest champion in the EU. Ankara's proposal to open up a port and an airport to Greek Cypriot shipping was a classic example of "divide http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=291 2006-12-07 13:12:16 Rwandan President Paul Kagame said on Thursday that Dominique de Villepin, now prime minister, was among French officials who supported the 1994 Rwandan genocide. "There are French officials who were involved at that time who are sti http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=290 2006-12-07 16:12:50 Unfettered capitalism is destroying the environment and deepening inequalities, said Arnaud Montebourg, a policy adviser to French Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal. ``Deregulation has brought globalization to a dead end,'' Montebourg sai http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=289 2006-12-07 12:12:01 Indonesia has refused to cut the price of rice by allowing it to be imported despite accepting a World Bank analysis that the commodity’s soaring retail cost was the main cause of the country’s mounting poverty. Aburizal Bakrie, the senior welfare mini http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=288 2006-12-07 12:12:38 In the pantheon of Hollywood lifetime-achievement crazies, few can top Mel Gibson; and nothing in Gibson's checkered past will top his new Mayan epic, Apocalypto, due out tomorrow. Gibson's lifelong preoccupations--face paint, torture, the male ponytail- http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=287 2006-12-07 00:12:11 In a micro-market like this, a homeowner who lacks a title to his house and property (an "informal" homeowner) but has a bit of extra cash, might buy a single bag of cement and a dozen cement blocks and use it to add a few square feet to a house wall. Fin http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=285 2006-12-06 15:12:52 oday we have the second round of questions and answers with one of the world’s leading pro-globalization voices, Jagdish Bhagwati. I think you’ll find that he takes some very strong positions here - especially on the issue of “fair trade” - so there will http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=284 2006-12-06 15:12:28 VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, speaking after a landmark trip to Turkey, described the country on Wednesday as an example of a secular Muslim state able to shun "fundamentalist degeneration". In remarks at his weekly general audience, he also http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=283 2006-12-06 13:12:40 The myth of scientific objectivity and impartiality is hard to shake, though we have known for a long time how deeply ideals and prejudices can be embedded in scientific theories. Philosophers of science have long accepted that scientists are human beings http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=282 2006-12-06 13:12:40 The president of Pakistan pledged yesterday to ban the sale of brides along with other controversial customs that deny women basic human rights. Gen Pervez Musharraf announced that his government would shortly push through legislation that would also e http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=281 2006-12-06 12:12:45 Over one hundred widows who lost their spouses during the 1994 genocide yesterday took to the streets, protesting against the French Government. The seemingly angry widows, many in their early fifties, chanted anti-France slogans as they marched throug http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=280 2006-12-06 11:12:56 Hopes for an open skies aviation pact between the US and the European Union suffered a severe setback on Tuesday when the US abandoned plans to give overseas investors more influence in the management of its airlines. Bowing to pressure from Congress, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=279 2006-12-06 13:12:04 It was a very embarrassing moment. The scene: the lobby of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The players: Segolene Royal's spokesman Julian Dray and a representative of CRIF, the umbrella organization of the Jewish community in France. "I have nothing to http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=278 2006-12-06 11:12:52 A typical day’s drinking for Samuel Pepys in early Restoration London might go like this. At about ten o’clock, he would have his “morning draft”—usually “small” (or weak) beer, but sometimes regular beer or even wine. Cakes might be eaten with the draft, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=277 2006-12-06 07:12:28 The present-day relevance of this war movie hardly needs to be spelled out. At least since 1789, the idea of France has represented, at least in theory, both a set of universal aspirations and a particular national identity. “Days of Glory” shows just how http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=276 2006-12-06 03:12:32 David Ignatius of Washington Post and Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek are moderating a discussion on turkish bid to join EU. Add a comment and join the conversation. Or propose a new discussion topic and change the conversation. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=275 2006-12-06 02:12:41 The pope seems genuinely to think that some "spiritual bonds" might unite Christians and Muslims. The question of Islam is a knotty one: Is it a Christian heresy, as the last Church Father, John of Damascus, thought? Is it an entirely separate religion, l http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=274 2006-12-06 02:12:30 Antispam firms spotted the skyrocketing amount of image spam this summer. A technology arms race ensued. The filtering companies adopted an approach called optical character recognition, which scans the images in an e-mail and tries to recognize any lette http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=273 2006-12-06 01:12:46 The wacky world Roz Chast has created in her cartoons is a parallel universe to ours, utterly recognizable in all its banalities and weirdnesses, but slightly askew, as if our current 2000-something reality had been transported back to the 1950’s TV land http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=272 2008-01-06 18:01:49 In recent years there has been a flurry of films, books and oral histories about Turkey’s past, and the country feels more democratic than at any time in its short history. Last year, Turkey held a conference on the killings of Armenians in the World War http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=271 2006-12-05 17:12:26 Yes, I admit it. This is a theme I've been harping on for almost a quarter of a century: Syria sees Lebanon as an illegitimate breakaway from a great empire ruled from and by Damascus. Parts of Iraq and Turkey, and Cyprus in its entirety, are also duchies http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=270 2006-12-05 15:12:15 Pakistan could be willing to give up its claim to Kashmir if India agrees to a self-government plan for the disputed Himalayan region, President Pervez Musharraf said today. General Musharraf told the Indian New Delhi Television channel his country wou http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=269 2006-12-05 14:12:17 France, steeped in genocidal blood, must face trial The hastily arranged car boot sale outside the French Embassy in downtown Kigali last Monday did good business. On offer were laptop computers, televisions, three-piece suites and, well, even the cars http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=268 2006-12-05 12:12:08 A triumphant Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's anti-US president, left his supporters in no doubt about his intent following a landslide election win. Addressing thousands of jubilant supporters from the balcony of the Miraflores Palace in Caracas, the former s http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=267 2006-12-05 12:12:38 The lines of political battle were redrawn in Italy on Tuesday after a prominent opposition politician withdrew his party from the centre-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi, the former premier. Pier Ferdinando Casini, the most powerful figure in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=266 2006-12-05 11:12:40 German chancellor Angela Merkel has been forced to moderate her hard-line stance on Turkey’s bid for membership of the European Union, apparently withdrawing a proposal for an 18-month deadline for Ankara to open its ports to Cyprus. She said the Europ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=265 2006-12-05 11:12:42 Although Segolene Royal is not a head of state, she enjoyed a welcome fit for a queen. No head of an opposition was ever greeted so warmly in Israel and by the country's leaders as was Royal. Legions of the press followed her everywhere, fighting w ith ea http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=264 2006-12-05 11:12:00 In an essay on Walt Disney, Anthony Lane defends Disney from critics who charge him with taking too much credit for his company's films: "It is true that Disney cartoons were not physically sketched by Disney, but you might as well complain that Henry For http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=263 2006-12-05 08:12:55 http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=262 2006-12-04 17:12:42 http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=261 2006-12-04 17:12:39 http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=260 2006-12-04 17:12:54 High Philosophy and Low Comedy The critics of South Park – and they are legion – bitterly complain about its relentless obscenity and potty humor. And they have a legitimate point. But if one wanted to mount a high-minded defense of the show’s low-mind http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=259 2006-12-04 16:12:51 Stephen Hawking, the genius who wrote a best seller that most readers couldn't understand, believes the human race is destined to colonize planets in other star systems. However, Hawking's vision sounds more like the cult space western series Firefly than http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=258 2006-12-04 16:12:23 Liberals and libertarians already share considerable common ground, the president of Cato and the executive director of the Sierra Club have come out together in favor of a zero-subsidy energy policy. A nascent fusionism on these issues already exists; i http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=257 2006-12-04 17:12:09 French Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal said in a meeting with Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik Monday afternoon that if she was elected president, she would “do everything to prevent Iran from achieving even peaceful nuclear capability”. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=256 2006-12-04 14:12:45 Every year as December 7 approaches we hear and read that eight battleships were sunk at Pearl Harbor. That is even repeated in a 2001 article by HNN staff on the HNN website debunking movie myths about Pearl Harbor. It didn’t happen. Eight battl http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=255 2006-12-04 11:12:12 Who cares that Japan’s opening a century and a half ago was coerced? More of us should. The endeavor - always celebrated here as a brilliant stroke, as Commodore Matthew Perry has always been hailed (currently by the relative handful who know more than h http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=254 2006-12-04 10:12:30 In the beginning was ...? ALAN BROADHURST, Nottingham Simplicity. What is there to distinguish your intolerance from that of a religious fanatic? TONY REYNOLDS, By e-mail It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of cou http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=253 2006-12-04 10:12:34 So Tony Blair apologised for the slave trade - or maybe didn't. He expressed sorrow that it had happened. Fair enough: no one was saying he was personally responsible for it anyhow. But it's obviously a lot easier for politicians to regret the evils of pr http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=252 2006-12-04 09:12:43 East to West, the flight has begun. Israel’s controversial “separation barrier”, expanding inexorably over wadis and high streets, is near completion along large stretches of its route. Slab by 30ft slab, it seals off Jewish-majority West Jerusalem to pro http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=251 2006-12-04 09:12:22 China has overtaken Japan to become the second biggest spender on research and development behind the US, a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development revealed. The country is expected to invest $136bn in research and develo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=250 2006-12-04 09:12:08 Germany and France will on Tuesday demand tougher conditions for Turkey’s troubled European Union membership bid, in a move likely to cause new divisions over Ankara at next week’s EU summit. Jacques Chirac, French president, will use a meeting with An http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=249 2006-12-04 09:12:01 The European Union will on Monday bolster its energy ties with resource-rich Kazakh-stan, as part of its efforts to lessen European dependence on Russian oil and gas supplies. In an accord to be signed in Brussels, the EU and Kazakhstan will agree to e http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=248 2006-12-04 08:12:12 Trouble for the Socialist candidate on her first official visit abroad since winning the nomination. Ségolène Royal has been caught in a war of words over her meeting with a Hezbollah MP in Lebanon. Today she meets Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=247 2006-12-04 08:12:18 The trail of clues in the mysterious death of Alexander V. Litvinenko may lead to Moscow, as the former spy claimed on his deathbed. But solving the nuclear whodunit may prove harder than Scotland Yard and many scientists at first anticipated. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=246 2006-12-04 03:12:48 Publishers and the music industry feasted on buyers by forcing them to purchase things they didn't want—a whole album to secure one favorite song. But given a choice, many buyers prefer to make an unbundled purchase. Unbundling the news they want from the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=245 2006-12-04 03:12:17 The idea of multiple selves may seem like a stoner’s fantasy, but economists who study human decision-making have found it surprisingly useful. Consider: Most people, if given a choice today between doing seven hours of irksome work on May 1, 2007, versus http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=244 2006-12-04 03:12:48 Berocca is a fizzy tablet, like Alka-Seltzer with multivitamins. During the holidays, its ability to settle stomachs and soothe headaches probably saves more family relationships than make-up sex. In places with robust drinking cultures, it is practicall http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=243 2006-12-04 03:12:44 First it was blamed on Thanksgiving: the sell-off in the US dollar was the result of turkeys being digested by Wall Street. But the dollar's decline has continued long after that holiday ended and now threatens to slide all the way to Christmas. Some argu http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=242 2006-12-04 02:12:50 The nation's intelligence agencies are giving their cold-war-era computer systems a makeover. But will blogs and wikis really help spies uncover terrorist plots? When the Orange Revolution erupted in Ukraine, I went to Technorati, a search engine that sc http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=241 2006-12-03 17:12:42 As a global hegemon the United States has always been preoccupied with its standing in the international order. Recurrent fears over its imminent decline, incessant preoccupation with geo-political strategies for the maintenance of empire, or, more recent http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=240 2006-12-03 15:12:38 For three decades, Peter Singer's views on such issues as animal rights, abortion, euthanasia, infanticide and how to tackle world poverty, have led him to be lauded and condemned to an extent that sets him apart from most academic thinkers. Today, the so http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=239 2006-12-03 12:12:37 The most notable discovery last week from a survey of British attitudes to Muslim women in full veil was a morass of confusion and unease. One in three respondents thought that women should be banned from publicly wearing the niqab, which conceals everyth http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=238 2006-12-03 12:12:21 AT FIRST it was embarrassed and infuriated by the mockumentary film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. But Kazakhstan could have the last laugh as it prepares to cash in on its first invasion of tourist http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=237 2006-12-03 10:12:21 THE Saudi Arabian government is emerging as a key player in talks to broker a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement. According to senior Israeli sources, Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, will soon meet high-ranking Saudi officials to explore http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=236 2006-12-03 10:12:10 MPs are preparing to send a delegation to Tony Blair demanding that he intervene to save the £10 billion Saudi arms deal threatened by a corruption inquiry. Backbenchers whose constituents’ jobs rely on the contract to sell Eurofighter jets to Saudi Ar http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=235 2006-12-03 10:12:25 French presidential candidate Segolene Royal met Sunday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas after attempts he made to form a more moderate national unity government broken down. Royal has been touring the Middle East to prove to voters at home tha http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=234 2006-12-03 09:12:25 Next May is the 300th anniversary of the Union of the Scottish and English Parliaments, which followed the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and began the United Kingdom. It should be a cause for much celebration of one of the most successful Unions the world h http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=233 2006-12-03 09:12:25 Not so long ago, it seemed that Europe would overcome prejudice and define itself as an ideology rather than a geography, a way of being in the world rather than a mere agglomeration of nation-states. But that chance is now lost. "Turkey will never be a f http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=232 2006-12-03 06:12:25 Traditional Canadian historiography held that the French Revolution had little effect in Canada and Quebec. Such a conclusion is confirmed once again by the recent book edited by Pierre H. Boulle and Richard A. Lebrun. This collection of eleven papers cho http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=231 2006-12-02 21:12:29 Between 1988 and 1995, when I was a political science professor at the Université de Montréal, I published five studies on the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville(1). I sought to illuminate how this great mind tried to reconcile two systems of thought which http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=230 2006-12-02 22:12:32 Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Stephane Dion, a former environment minister who entered politics a decade ago to fight separatism in his native province of Quebec, won the Liberal Party of Canada's leadership race today. Dion beat former Harvard University aca http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=229 2006-12-02 21:12:50 http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=228 2006-12-02 21:12:56 One need not accept Hegel’s view of history as a “slaughter bench” to see violence as a pervasive factor of human experience. As history teaches, a good part of the diplomatic and po-litical activities of humankind have been dedicated to dealing with http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=227 2006-12-02 20:12:03 BEIRUT, Lebanon: French presidential candidate Segolene Royal, visiting the Middle East on Saturday, condemned comments by a Lebanese Hezbollah legislator who compared Israel's former occupation of south Lebanon to the Nazi occupation of France. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=226 2006-12-02 20:12:38 ISTANBUL, Turkey — A criminal trial against two Turkish Christians accused of “insulting Turkishness” and inciting hatred against Islam grabbed national media coverage as religious tensions mounted before the visit of Pope Benedict XVI, who arrived in the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=225 2006-12-03 09:12:47 When Hakan Tastan wanted to amend the religion on his Turkish identity card, his enthusiastic championing of Christianity exasperated the official barring his way. Eventually, the official gave up trying to oppose the controversial change. “Change this he http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=224 2006-12-02 18:12:39 It was amid the delicate and rather spartan splendour of the 400-year-old Blue Mosque that Pope Benedict XVI made the most dramatic gesture of his visit to Turkey. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church, flanked by the white-robed Grand Mufti of Istanbul http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=223 2006-12-02 18:12:35 Over the Turkish republic's 83-year life, property worth hundreds of millions of dollars—schools, hospitals and orphanages, for example—has been appropriated from non-Muslim religious communities, and in particular from the Greek Orthodox church in Istanb http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=221 2006-12-02 06:12:28 Making such predictions is a dangerous business, but it can also be informative and entertaining. The chances are that phones will not only look very different—they may not even be seen. They may be hidden in jewellery or accessories, or even embedded in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=220 2006-12-02 04:12:47 “The Nativity Story” sticks to the familiar details of the narrative and dramatizes them with good taste. There are no flights of actorly or cinematic bravura. Rather than trying to reinterpret or modernize a well-known, cherished story, the filmmakers ha http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=219 2006-12-02 01:12:36 Although its recommendations will have no effect on American policy going forward, Baker Commision have already had a very damaging effect throughout the world, and especially in the Middle East and in Iraq. It has successfully conveyed the impression to http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=218 2006-12-02 00:12:55 Maliki government has failed. The cause of that failure is rooted in an Iraqi political culture that makes it as yet impossible for enough of the political leadership to act with a sense of national consciousness. We should nonetheless make a last effort http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=217 2006-12-02 00:12:45 For many in my generation, the word "war" is nothing more than a degraded metaphor. I've known it all my life, mainly in slogans like "war on poverty," "war on cancer," and, most recently, "war on terrorism." The word recalls Ralph Waldo Emerson's remark http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=216 2006-12-02 00:12:38 The political polarisation of Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian revolution" in Venezuela is reproduced in the way the phenomenon is reported and assessed. Phil Gunson assails the defects of "solidarity journalism" and calls for a debate about Venezuela based on r http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=215 2006-12-01 17:12:15 A Danish experiment in citizen-led decision-making left Grahame Thompson convinced that "deliberative democracy" needs to rethink the balance between process and outcome. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=214 2006-12-01 17:12:32 The idea that the government has no business meddling in relationships between consenting adults is, of course, a pillar of the gay-marriage movement. Opponents of gay marriage have always argued that opening the institution to homosexuals would put Ameri http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=213 2006-12-01 16:12:19 The EU goal helps to stabilise several shaky elements in Turkey. For the moderate Islamist government, it offers protection against military intervention. For the army, it guarantees secularism. For business, it entrenches market reform. For Kurds, it pro http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=212 2006-12-01 16:12:15 The governor's office in this tense city had rarely been so crowded. Friends, colleagues and officials were queuing to congratulate Abdul Rahman Mustafa on surviving the second assassination attempt on him within a fortnight. A suicide bomber blew hims http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=211 2006-12-01 15:12:09 Rubbish and rusting car parts are piled near the simple two-storey house where Judith Aponte lives in Santa Eduvigis, a poor neighbourhood in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. The 43-year-old trainee social worker is fed up about it and annoyed, too, by a rec http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=210 2006-12-01 12:12:24 In the short time since Ségolène Royal’s triumphant victory in the Socialist party “primaries”, the mood in France has changed spectacularly. Previously, left and right both feared the other side would win next spring’s election; now the left is elated an http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=209 2006-12-01 16:12:00 Demographically speaking, “The Fountain” may reach a slightly different audience from the one that went to see “Jackass Number Two.” For a start, Aronofsky is untroubled by the need for humor, his eye being on higher things. Not a streak of black comedy, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=208 2006-12-01 03:12:49 Christopher Guest--actor, writer, director of mockumentaries like "Waiting for Guffmann", "Best in Show", "Mighty Wind", and most of all, husband to Jamie lee Curtis--offers the heart of everyone in the movie business for your consideration. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=207 2006-12-01 03:12:15 So often these days, the Founding Fathers get held up as paragons, possessed of a singular, even freakish merit. Yet if you visit the John Adams homestead in Braintree, Massachusetts, you can picture America's second president as a mere boy in his http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=206 2006-12-01 14:12:20 What is wrong with utilitarianism? Jeremy Bentham designed his doctrine for political leaders, and the design seems to have been successful. Hasn’t cost-benefit analysis become the standard form of moral reasoning in the arenas of public life? Isn’t this http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=205 2006-11-30 16:11:56 The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan have produced a new glimmer of hope for a resolution of the Karabakh conflict following their third face-to-face meeting in less than a year. Robert Kocharian and Ilham Aliyev have indicated that they made further http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=204 2006-11-30 14:11:43 Burma’s military rulers have in effect ordered the International Committee of the Red Cross to cease its humanitarian work in the country, as the regime hardens its stand towards international agencies’ efforts to assist the long-suffering population. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=203 2006-11-30 14:11:05 Turkey and the European Union were last night set on a collision course after Brussels took the unprecedented step of calling for a partial suspension of Ankara's EU membership talks. To the fury of Turkey, which denounced the move as "unacceptable", t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=202 2006-11-30 13:11:09 The policy of hugging America close has been a failure for the British, a US State Department analyst claims From the outset, Kendall Myers appeared determined to explode what he described as the “myth” of the special relationship between Britain a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=201 2006-11-30 12:11:43 It is important that the closing is in keeping with the spirit of the message or it may create some sort of cognitive dissonance. If you’re complaining to a company about a product and you sign off with ‘Warmly,’ you are miscommunicating. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=200 2006-11-30 01:11:47 This volume contains twelve essays on early modern philosophers from Machiavelli to Mill, addressing their views on the passions from the perspective of intellectual and literary history. Its appearance is timely. Interest in 17th and 18th century theorie http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=199 2006-11-29 16:11:17 Putin's restorationist regime is taking Russia in a direction not only different from the one pursued by Yeltsin but, in many regards, its opposite. This turn of events carries profoundly unsettling implications. Not only is the survival of Russian democr http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=198 2006-11-29 14:11:19 Homer and Goya Ethics and art collude to show us what we do with our lives and with our deaths, and what we do with the lives and deaths of others. Ethics enlists the rhetoric of verbal, visual, and mimetic art, deriving its concepts and arguments from a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=197 2006-11-29 13:11:10 Thousands of armed Venezuelans are preparing to ensure that President Hugo Chavez is re-elected on Sunday and will "shed their blood" for the cause if necessary. Paranoid about the pro http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=196 2006-11-29 13:11:08 Sweden’s government will not succumb to economic protectionism in its forthcoming disposal of multi-billion dollar state holdings in industry, the country’s new centre-right prime minister has said. Fredrik Reinfeldt said foreign investors were welcome http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=195 2006-11-29 11:11:32 Wearing the hijab may or may not be a manifestation of the free exercise of religion. For any individual, it may reflect the very opposite--religious coercion. In fact, millions of women are forced to wear the hijab for fear of physical retribution. And t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=194 2006-11-29 04:11:53 One theory that has received attention recently is the “hygiene hypothesis,” the idea that children today are raised in homes that are too clean and that asthma is somehow caused by the lack of exposure to infections and bits of microbes early in life. Un http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=193 2006-11-29 03:11:45 “Public space” is the space where individuals see and are seen by others as they engage in public affairs. It is, thus, the space of the town hall meeting, the legislative assembly or any of the other venues where public business is done. In her book, O http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=192 2006-11-28 18:11:40 The objectionable thing about the proposed Baker-Hamilton "talks" is not that they are talks but that they give the impression of looking for someone to whom to surrender. And they have, apparently, no preconditions. It would be an excellent thing to have http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=191 2006-11-28 17:11:56 Gingrich makes his case against withdrawal in 11 stepts. He states: these 11 steps would be a powerful basis on which to move forward in Iraq and in the world. What's more, they reflect the spirit of Gen. Washington when he chose "victory or death" as th http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=190 2006-11-28 17:11:57 The Liberal Democrat spokesperson on Home Affairs presses the case for the need of a Freedom Bill to protect civil liberties and freedom in our society and argues that more thought should be put in introducing laws. The current Labour government is add http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=189 2006-11-28 17:11:16 Four Government-paid surveys smeared across the world in key media * Cuban-Venezuelan international PR and lobby in high gear previous to Sunday's high-profile presidential elections, creating a spin that could allow President Chavez to disavow unf http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=188 2006-11-28 16:11:17 Hearing of Weber’s death in 1920, many in the German academic community might have thought the news referred to Alfred Weber, Professor of Economics at the University of Heidelberg. While his elder brother Max had recently made a forceful return to public http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=187 2006-11-28 15:11:22 Jürgen Habermas is the only contemporary philosopher whose œuvre could withstand comparison to the encyclopaedic accomplishments of German Idealism. To all appearances, the ambition of the early Frankfurt School to transform this philosophical legacy into http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=186 2006-11-28 15:11:42 If there were something you could take after experiencing a painful or traumatic event that would permanently weaken your memory of what had just happened, would you take it? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=185 2006-11-28 15:11:27 Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez is an ally of the Iranian mullahs, a supporter of North Korea, a close friend of Fidel Castro and a good customer for Putin. Now he's also a business partner of Joe Kennedy. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=184 2006-11-28 11:11:35 Christians are only a tiny minority in Turkey. But they have high hopes for Pope's visit this week. Many feel their religious rights are severely limited in the predominantly Muslim country.Constitutionally, christians are guaranteed the right to practice http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=183 2006-11-28 07:11:41 The Islamic headscarf, or hijab, has been arousing controversy not only in the west. In Egypt, remarks by Farouk Hosni, the culture minister, describing it as a sign of “backwardness”, have unleashed a storm of anger, with 130 deputies in parliament fr http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=182 2006-11-27 23:11:59 This volume consists of a wide range of interdisciplinary studies of the body under various interpretations, drawing upon philosophy (with a strong emphasis on phenomenology), psychoanalysis and neuroscience, and with the concepts of body image and body s http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=181 2006-11-27 19:11:20 The new Dobbs surprises everyone, including WSJ's Daniel Henninger. He writes: “It’s as if whatever made Linda Blair’s head spin around in ‘The Exorcist’ had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=180 2006-11-27 18:11:00 Thousands of Turks have already rallied to protest the visit of Pope Benedict XVI -- even before his arrival tomorrow. But not everyone’s against him. Ozlem Karci, a student at Istanbul University, says Bened http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=179 2006-11-27 14:11:52 Jean-Fabien Spitz has significantly contributed to a renewed interest in republicanism. Alongside contemporaries such as Quentin Skinner, Sudhir Hazareesingh and Richard Whatmore, Spitz has endeavored to study classic republican texts in order to illumina http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=178 2006-11-27 14:11:03 A new Reform report today shows that less than one pound in every five spent on benefits places any responsibility on claimants to find work, a major new report shows today. The Government was elected on a pledge to turn benefits from a “hand out” to a “ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=177 2006-11-27 12:11:51 The University of Oxford geneticist and campaigning atheist Richard Dawkins has established a foundation to keep God out of the classroom and prevent "pseudo science" taking over in schools, it emerged today. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=176 2006-11-27 10:11:43 University College London, one of the country's elite universities, is in discussions to set up a city academy in a deprived area of London to encourage more children to be scientists. The university's academics would help teach and try to enthuse the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=175 2006-11-27 09:11:12 “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado,” Alec Baldwin’s character says in the film “Glengarry Glen Ross.” “Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” A study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades f http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=174 2006-11-27 09:11:56 Corruption has existed in Venezuela since at least 1821, when it gained independence. In the 19thand 20th centuries, the level of corruption fluctuated, depending on the government in power. During the government of President Hugo Chávez, however, corrupt http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=173 2006-11-27 09:11:05 One of the most important figures in the animal rights movement has publicly backed the use of living creatures in medical experiments. The endorsement - by the philosopher Peter Singer, who coined the phrase Animal Liberation and whose Seventies book on http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=172 2006-11-26 21:11:29 The seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophical movement that came to be known as the Enlightenment was once the crown jewel of the western intellectual heritage. It promised lives based on order and reason. It seemed to offer the promise of human pe http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=171 2006-11-26 21:11:09 Pope's visit draws the world's attention on the stranglehold the Turkish state attempts to exercise on Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and his people. If Turkey is to be the model of a modern Islamic society, it must remove restrictions on the exercise http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=170 2006-11-26 18:11:44 Patrick Suskind's 1985 novel about the power of scent, sold 15 million copies around the world. But it took 21 years to find its way onto screens. Producers competed to obtain the film rights, but Mr. Süskind felt there were only two people who could poss http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=169 2006-11-26 17:11:17 The myth isn't just silly, it's destructive. Whatever brief boost the rewriting of history may provide for Iroquois self-esteem, it steals attention from the many real and persistent problems now facing the country's 1.4 million Native Americans--the Iroq http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=168 2006-11-26 06:11:58 The men were charged under Turkey's notorious Article 301, which has been used to bring charges against dozens of intellectuals - including Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk as well as a law against inciting hatred based on religion. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=167 2006-11-26 04:11:32 Emrys Westacott, in an article published in The Journal of Applied Philosophy, states that for the first time in the history civil manners is on the rise especially n the West. Noone, including African-Americans, gays, women, can be openly abused and in http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=166 2006-11-26 03:11:17 As a party night, Saturday historically has everything going for it. Named for Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture, Saturday carried connotations of a bountiful harvest after a week of toil. For Christians, Saturday night was the evening they could indul http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=165 2006-11-26 05:11:40 We are at a point where the Reagan era might finally be over, including the eight years of Bill Clinton. Overcoming protests from labor unions, a traditional constituency, the Clinton administration vigorously supported free trade agreements like Nafta a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=164 2006-11-26 02:11:52 NEW YORK: Columbia University’s star philosophy professor, Akeel Bilgrami, is used to being in the spotlight. His books are widely read and the Hyderabad-born thinker-writer has a formidable reputation as an intellectual and US foreign policy skeptic. Sin http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=163 2006-11-25 19:11:55 Retreating from Iraq would simply encourage Islamists to attack U.S. allies and targets. Before it leaves Iraq, the US must inflict a dramatic and decisive defeat upon the Sunni insurgents. That defeat must be more than military; it must also be political http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=162 2006-11-25 17:11:41 Azeri police have evicted a main opposition party and a newspaper from their offices in the capital, Baku. About 100 officers surrounded the building, housing the Azadliq newspaper and the Popular Front party. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=161 2006-11-25 16:11:43 The people of the Middle East are destroying themselves, literally and figuratively, with the politics of assassination. So many things are going right in the modern world -- until we reach the boundaries of the Middle East, where the gunmen hide in wait. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=160 2006-11-25 15:11:26 First there was "On Bullshit," a slim philosophical treatise whose phenomenal success took the publishing industry by surprise. Then came a succession of books with the word "bullshit" in the title. And now there is "On Truth," a sequel to "On Bullshit http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=159 2006-11-25 14:11:19 Wednesday’s general elections in the Netherlands were won by the far-left. The Communist Socialistische Partij (SP) added 17 seats to the 9 it previously held, securing an overall number of 26 seats in the 150-seat Dutch Parliament. The SP became the coun http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=158 2006-11-25 12:11:52 Pervez Hoodbhoy's critique of General Pervez Musharraf as a leader and as an author, in last month's Prospect, is depressingly familiar. Of course we wish that Pakistan was a more liberal and democratic society. Of course it faces massive social and econo http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=157 2006-11-25 11:11:54 He has been dubbed a British Mozart, a child prodigy who began composing at the age of nine and at 20 became the youngest composer to have a work performed at the Proms. But George Benjamin, one of Britain's most enigmatic and important contemporary co http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=156 2006-11-25 10:11:24 If you have ever sat alone in a bar, depressed by how good-looking everybody else seems to be, take comfort—it may be evolution playing a trick on you. A study just published in Evolution and Human Behavior by Sarah Hill, a psychologist at the University http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=155 2006-11-25 09:11:35 How was Alexander Litvinenko murdered? We don’t know yet; we may never find out, but what is clear is his death marks the start of a new Cold War. The question is how to win it. Vladimir Putin’s thuggish and arrogant rhetoric; the routine use of murder http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=154 2006-11-25 07:11:35 A week ago, few westerners or Russians had heard of Alexander Litvinenko. Yet his gaunt and sallow face, splashed across newspapers this week, threatens to become a defining image of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. His deathbed charge that the Russian president http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=153 2006-11-25 07:11:59 Punishment involves a deliberate infliction of suffering or deprivation. Suffering and deprivation are in themselves bad things. So we need a justification for punishing an offender. What is it? Those who say 'Because she deserved it' look back to the pas http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=152 2006-11-24 18:11:32 The timing could hardly have been better. The call of Tocquevillian ideals—civic virtue, active citizens, strong community associations—has seldom been stronger. This is particularly true in America, which Tocqueville visited in 1831-32 and wrote about en http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=151 2006-11-24 17:11:35 ‘If the rights of man are to be upheld in a dark time, we shall require an age of reason,’ wrote Christopher Hitchens last year on the dust jacket of Harvey Kaye’s recent book on Paine.[*] And as if to reinforce that message, he has now himself published http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=150 2006-11-24 17:11:35 The authorities in Azerbaijan have shut down the country's biggest independent broadcaster, ANS. They said ANS's licence was not renewed because it had violated the broadcasting law and disregarded official warnings and fines. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=149 2006-11-24 13:11:58 Iran's passionate love affair with football is under strain after it was suspended from international competition because of alleged government meddling. The ban - ordered by football's world governing body, Fifa - jeopardises Iran's chances of partici http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=148 2006-11-24 12:11:36 Rwanda has recalled its ambassador to France as the row between the two countries over culpability for the 1994 Rwandan genocide spiralled to a new low. The decision to bring Emmanuel Ndagijimana home from Paris was made after a French judge issued arr http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=147 2006-11-24 12:11:29 Perhaps we should call it the new European disease: the inability of European electorates to produce clear election results. On Wednesday night, the Dutch joined the club, already inhabited by Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. There is no majori http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=146 2006-11-24 12:11:09 Frustrated by stagnant wages and rising health costs and fearful that their jobs will be sent to China, anxious voters, particularly in the industrial heartland, sent a new brand of Democrat to Congress: one who may believe in God and guns but who is wary http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=145 2006-11-24 07:11:04 "Borat" is the worst thing to happen to Kazakhstan since the Mongol hordes. But it is one thing more: an unintentionally revealing demonstration of the unfortunate attitude many liberal Jews have toward working-class American Christians, especially evange http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=144 2006-11-24 04:11:18 Infernal Affairs’, the 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller that pitched a Triad mole in the police force against an undercover cop in the mob, finds its reflection in ‘The Departed’. We’ve moved to Irish Boston, where hotheaded rookie Billy Costigan (Leonardo D http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=143 2006-11-24 03:11:49 In May, Thomas Pynchon turns 70. Our mightiest, and most elusive, novelist reaches his biblically appointed three score and 10. It would be cause for alarm, the aging of such a perpetually youthful sensibility, except that Pynchon celebrates this momentou http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=142 2006-11-23 16:11:44 The assassination of Pierre Gemayel, a Lebanese cabinet minister and scion of a ruling Christian Maronite family, in Beirut on Tuesday has sent shockwaves through the country's establishment and is shaping the political feud raging throughout the country. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=141 2006-11-23 16:11:01 In recent weeks the idea that the United States and the UK should “engage” Syria, but also Iran, to stabilise Iraq has been all the rage. On Tuesday, in an east Beirut suburb, Lebanon’s industry minister, Pierre Gemayel, showed what the cost of engagement http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=140 2006-11-23 16:11:45 The idea of a "Turkish model" that might calm and give a sense of direction to the Middle East has often been conjured up in recent decades by hopeful policymakers, mostly in Washington and London. Few people in the Middle East took much notice. Arabs http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=139 2006-11-23 15:11:48 A Dutch animal rights party has become the first animal interest group to enter a European parliament, the group said on its website on Thursday, after winning two seats in the country's general election. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=138 2006-11-23 15:11:45 In the 1920s, Captain Arthur Carlos de Barros Basto, a decorated Portuguese WW1 veteran who survived gas attacks in Flanders, began a quasi-messianic movement in northern Portugal to “out” Marranos and bring them back to normative Judaism. Basto, a free m http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=137 2006-11-23 15:11:27 For the first time since the forced baptism of 1497 (unlike Spain, Portugal did not expel its Jews, it simply baptized them all), Hanukah lights will burn in public in the old Jewish quarter of Olival, in downtown historic Porto. Ladina, a Porto based non http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=136 2006-11-23 16:11:23 In today's freewheeling marketplace of ideas, why are evangelicals seen as a dangerous threat? Even as book after book sounds the alarm about the evangelical menace — coming in January, Chris Hedges’ “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=135 2006-11-25 17:11:43 If you find the neocons—that much-talked-about Jewish conspiracy—scary, you will be downright terrified to learn about their christian cousins, the “theocons.” After spending several years in the very belly of the beast at the theocons’ flagship journal, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=134 2006-11-23 13:11:07 Paul Goodman, the Conservative member of the British parliament from Wycombe, gave what is perhaps the strongest-ever speech by a politician concerning Islamism. His stem-winder is worth quoting at length. In the debate surrounding the Queen's Speech, he http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=133 2006-11-23 12:11:41 The New York Times Book Review has selected a shorth list from books that has been reviewd in the past year. The list includes both fiction and non-fiction. Here is the list http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=132 2006-11-23 12:11:38 An airline will adjust its ticket prices on a minute-by-minute basis, depending on what competitors are charging. But how do they know the other guys' prices? Each airline enters its rates into the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. computer system, which in t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=129 2006-11-23 07:11:59 Realism is ascendant these days. If you look at some of the "realist" proposals on the table, realism has come to be a kind of code word for surrendering American interests and American allies, as well as American principles, in the Middle East. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=128 2006-11-23 07:11:31 Having a word stuck on the tip of the tongue is enough to activate an unusual condition in which some people perceive words as having different tastes, according to a new study. When people with the inherited condition, called synesthesia, looked at pictu http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=127 2006-11-22 16:11:10 He was compared to Fellini, as a creator of a cinematic world entirely his own, to Welles and to Stroheim. Like the latter two, he knew spectacular decline after glory, but unlike them, had a journeyman's pragmatism that allowed him to carry on, and more http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=126 2006-11-22 17:11:03 NKARA, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Turkey should pay a monthly subsidy to around five million poverty-stricken people in its mainly Kurdish eastern regions to help kickstart the local economy, said a U.N.-backed report unveiled on Wednesday. Incomes in eastern http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=125 2006-11-22 16:11:31 22/11/2006 01:46:50 ã Darwinism states creatures are members of the same tree of life Creation vs Darwin takes Muslim twist in Turkey A lavishly illustrated "Atlas of Creation" is mysteriously turning up at schools and libraries in Turkey http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=124 2006-11-22 15:11:48 Too many wretched years have been wasted under communal political management which skilfully divided and relabelled black and Asian Britons to disable progressive politics. This operational model was used effectively during colonialism and worked splendid http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=123 2006-11-22 12:11:16 While the ads in the London Review, a literary journal favored by the British intelligentsia, are weird in the extreme, they are also peculiarly English. This is a country where unironic sentiment makes people cringe with embarrassment. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=122 2006-11-22 04:11:44 Democrats argue that trade agreements should only be allowed if those nations pass laws "guaranteeing enforceable labor and environmental standards." John Edwards is a protectionist zealot; John Kerry said in 2004 that unless the treaties had the standard http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=121 2006-11-22 03:11:49 Purity balls are one of the newest ways that Christians are trying to keep their children chaste and free of sexually-transmitted diseases. The first started seven years ago in Colorado Springs, a city that is home to the lately disgraced Reverend Ted Hag http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=120 2006-11-21 18:11:10 Israel appeared to be the strongest, most reliable and most cost-effective bulwark against Soviet penetration of the Middle East. It could defeat any combination of Soviet clients on its own and, in so doing, humiliate the Soviet Union and drive thinking http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=119 2006-11-21 17:11:51 Everything that’s abysmal in the present political situation somehow conspired to make the recent publication in France of Alain Badiou’s long-awaited Logiques des mondes seem like an urgent message to pick up our conversation of twelve years ago exactly http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=118 2006-11-21 16:11:08 A formal recognition of the self-declared independent state of Somaliland in the Horn of Africa would be just in principle and a boon to the region and the continent, says Jawahir Adam. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=117 2006-11-21 17:11:55 Here we go again! The United Nations, already struggling to cope with the last set of reforms, receives the recommendations of yet another. In advance of the sixtieth anniversary meeting of the UN general assembly in September 2005, Kofi Annan had commiss http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=116 2006-11-22 11:11:39 Michael Richards' recent gig at an LA comedy club plays like the darkest, nastiest, most taboo-baiting script that Larry David never wrote. There on centre stage is the man still best known as Cosmo Kramer out of Seinfeld. In the audience sits a heckler w http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=115 2006-11-21 15:11:17 Back when I was a revolting revolutionary student, Labour students who ran university unions operated under the delusion that shutting up their opponents was the same as defeating them. Thus they demanded “No platform” for everybody from “fascists” (which http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=114 2006-11-21 15:11:09 A decade after the Dayton peace accords, Bosnia-Herzegovina remains a powerful symbol of the bitter deprivations and atrocious crimes of civil war. The plan to redefine a Bosnian state, divided between a Serb zone and a Moslem-Croat federation, was agr http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=113 2006-11-21 14:11:34 One of the great challenges of sustainable development is to combine society's desires for economic prosperity and social security. For decades economists and politicians have debated how to reconcile the undoubted power of markets with the reassuring pro http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=112 2006-11-21 13:11:52 Meeting in New York over the weekend, Muslim women from 25 countries began laying groundwork for the first international all-female council formed to issue fatwas. Their idea: to ensure that women's perspectives on Islamic law become part of religious del http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=111 2006-11-21 08:11:06 Human beings must adapt to the challenge of global warming. Twelve geological "tipping points," from Amazon deforestation to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, may force climate change to spin out of control. According to the article, to avoid catast http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=110 2006-11-21 08:11:57 The death of Milton Friedman has been an occasion for celebrating the magic of capitalism. Capitalism is brilliant at setting the price of potatoes. But how good is it at setting the price of a large company? To all appearances, the stock market is capit http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=109 2006-11-21 15:11:32 For the traveling Pontiff, it was not a laid-back Turkish holiday. The citizens of the proud, predominantly Muslim nation had no love of Popes. The news reported that an escaped killer was on the loose, threatening to assassinate the Pontiff when he arriv http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=108 2006-11-21 02:11:26 How a doctor's less-than- professional attire can affect patients' opinions. “You don’t want to look too attractive to be serious,” a doctor said, adding that “if you don’t meet their expectations, their anxiety level increases.” http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=107 2006-11-21 01:11:04 http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=106 2006-11-20 17:11:43 Paul could not help becoming the problem apostle. A couple of decades after Christ's crucifixion, he was committing his thoughts on the meaning of the Messiah to papyrus, thus setting himself up for the later charge that he had been the first to distort t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=105 2006-11-20 16:11:34 Tony Blair announced on Sunday that Britain would come close to doubling development aid to Pakistan over the next three years, focusing increased expenditure on ensuring that Islamic schools, or madrassah, do not come under the influence of extremists. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=104 2006-11-20 14:11:31 Tony Blair on Monday stepped up pressure on the UK’s Nato allies to send more troops and bolster support for Afghanistan ahead of a key summit in Riga, Latvia, at the end of this month. Speaking in Kabul after meeting President Hamid Karzai, the UK pri http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=103 2006-11-20 14:11:41 In a statement released Monday, the organizers - including many of the world's leading dolphin scientists and the man who trained the television star Flipper - say the hunt is nothing less than a ritual massacre of creatures that, according to a growing b http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=102 2006-11-21 13:11:20 Turkey has been given what looks like an ultimatum from the European Union Commission: Open your ports for ships from Cyprus within a month, or you may risk a halt to the EU accession talks now under way. At the same time, the Commission's latest report o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=101 2006-11-20 16:11:31 What Went Wrong essentially serves as the Islamic equivalent to Democracy in America, with one key difference. Tocqueville's book identified a variety of positive synergies between the traditions the American settlers brought with them and the challenges http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=100 2006-11-20 13:11:46 “One might think that standing up to bullies makes a good game, but not if you are using violence to stand up to them,” said Darcia Narvaez, a University of Notre Dame psychologist who researches moral development in children and the effects of violent vi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=99 2006-11-20 13:11:02 Why are some people more self-sufficient than others? Why are some people more willing to volunteer or help out than others? What makes some people seem stand-offish, while others move right in and help? http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=98 2006-11-20 13:11:18 The US is too busy to settle disputes between Sunnis and Shiites in downtown Baghdad. A century ago, another great global power was similarly occupied halfway across its world, fighting a war and organizing the constitutional arrangements of Dutch farmer http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=97 2006-11-20 04:11:46 The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it’s not cost-effective to use it for ethanol. And the tariffs and quotas for imported sugar mean that no one can afford to import foreign sugar and turn it into ethano http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=96 2007-12-31 15:12:27 While almost all the latecomers to European Union abolished the death penalty to join the Council of Europe, a prerequisite for joining the European Union. Few of these countries had a public debate about the death penalty before banning it; so no popular http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=95 2006-11-20 03:11:05 On October 29, 2006 Turkey celebrated the 83rd anniversary of its founding as a Republic. In its commemoration the Hürriyet, a high-circulation Turkish daily, carried a first page article “A REQUEST FROM THE GREAT GENIUS TO THE YOUNG REPUBLIC” by Murat B http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=94 2006-11-19 16:11:12 In the Jewish community, a curious feature of the controversy about Darwin and intelligent design is the funny way it has of making strange bedfellows. You might expect to find all religious conservatives lining up against Darwinism. Not so. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=93 2006-11-19 15:11:29 Neoconservatives have the president’s ear, but they also have lots of baggage. To stay relevant, they must admit mistakes, embrace public diplomacy, and start making the case for bombing Iran. Even if things in Iraq get better, a nuclear Iran will negate http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=92 2006-11-19 14:11:24 Advocates of military action insist that getting tough with Iran is the only way to salvage Iraq. By tipping over Iran they would recover their losses in Iraq—like doubling your bet. It would be an attempt to revive the concept of spreading democracy by c http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=91 2006-11-19 13:11:12 The tendency in some political discourse now is to say that, because the Constitution that was meant to prepare for enlargement failed to be ratified, this shows that the enlargement process has now hit a roadblock called ‘absorptive capacity’, with the E http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=90 2006-11-19 11:11:29 Everywhere you look nowadays, Islam is used (and misused) as a political force. Some Muslims use it as a call to action; many in the West (and elsewhere) perceive Islam as an "other" demanding containment and exclusion. As a Turk, I feel both sides of thi http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=89 2006-11-19 08:11:22 Alexander Litvinenko, a former lieutenant-colonel with Russia's FSB security service and a staunch critic of Vladimir Putin's regime, fled to Britain in 2000, saying he feared for his life. Yesterday, the Metropolitan Police said he was in a "serious but http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=88 2006-11-19 12:11:49 A former colleague of mine in the US Senate, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once said: "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts." I was reminded of this upon reading the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley's http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=87 2006-11-19 07:11:01 Those who think of Ayn Rand as the icon of callow youths rather than a serious moral philosopher are unlikely to recognize the Rand whom Smith presents to us. Drawing on Rand's novels, lectures, essays, and letters, Smith shows that her ethical theory is http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=86 2006-11-19 05:11:00 While Iran feels that the perceived victory of Hezbollah over Israel in the summer war boosted its own prestige, it does not want Hezbollah’s rise to plunge Lebanon into chaos; instead, it wants Hezbollah to consolidate power and help spread Shiite influe http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=85 2006-11-19 04:11:51 Once, it was commonplace for doctors to marry nurses and executives to marry secretaries. Now the wedding pages are stocked with matched sets, men and women who share a tax bracket and even an alma mater. People, like other members of the animal kingdom, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=84 2006-11-19 04:11:10 SHAITIYEH, Lebanon - Nearly a month after setting up their base near this small village in southern Lebanon, Turkish troops — the first force from a Muslim country to join the beefed-up UN peacekeeping presence here — are ready for their first mission. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=83 2006-11-19 07:11:56 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top Bush administration official on Friday said the European Union, the United Nations and other international entities increasingly are using international law to challenge U.S. powers to reject treaties and protect itself from a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=82 2006-11-19 08:11:49 As a student, I often looked from the other side of the Rhine over here to the seat of the four high commissioners. Today I enter the Petersberg for the first time. The historic surroundings recall the deep roots that the old Bundesrepublik sank into the http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=81 2006-11-18 20:11:39 First things first: since Richard Dawkins and I are allies on several fronts, and friends, and since we have both recently published books on religion http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=80 2006-11-18 19:11:25 Putin's Russia is not a trivial authoritarian state. It is not "Soviet Union lite". It is not a liberal democracy either. It is, however, a "managed democracy". The term captures the logic and the mechanisms of the reproduction of power and the way de http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=79 2006-11-18 19:11:32 Wong, avatar of the cosmopolitan cool, describes his film “My Blueberry Nights,” as a road movie shot in New York, Memphis, Las Vegas and Ely, Nev., with a cast that includes Jude Law, Norah Jones, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz. His last film, “2046,” was http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=78 2006-11-18 18:11:28 A BAN on wearing the burka in public in the Netherlands moved a step closer yesterday, just five days before voters go to the polls in elections that had not until now focused on issues of race and immigration. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=76 2006-11-18 15:11:54 Milton Friedman, who has died aged 94, was the last of the great economists to combine possession of a household name with the highest professional credentials. In this respect he was often compared to John Maynard Keynes, whose work he always respected, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=75 2006-11-18 19:11:28 In the grimy alleys of Istanbul's Kumkapi district the air is thick with a rarely heard language: Armenian. Marina Martossian, who has been working illegally for five months as a cleaner, is typical of 40,000 compatriots there. She is delighted with her $ http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=74 2006-11-18 12:11:11 Love has a messy charisma and a style — those ripped babydoll dresses and smeared makeup — that felt like a satire of sexiness. With her big hips, she is the first female celebrity in a long time who isn't embarrassed to take up space. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=73 2006-11-18 10:11:43 Bond: ‘A vodka martini, please.’ Casino barman: ‘Shaken or stirred?’ Bond: ‘Do I look like I give a damn?’ It’s a sharp and knowing line – probably penned by Paul Haggis, the talented, final scriptwriter of this highly enjoyable ‘back-to-basics re-boot’ o http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=72 2006-11-18 10:11:53 Give George W. Bush his due. He took down the Taliban. And he also took down Saddam. These are achievements. What he did not grasp is the sheer and relentless butchery of which both Sunni and Shia are capable. The fiendish barbarism of decapitated heads a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=70 2006-12-01 23:12:27 French authors can hardly be faulted for not being productive: over the past two months, they have published no fewer than 475 new novels. Yet despite all this creative energy, probably the most striking feature of this fall’s literary season is that of s http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=69 2006-11-18 04:11:51 Even an arch-realist like Colin Powell understood that when we broke it, we owned it. Many Democrats have embraced a proposal called "phased redeployment," a politically expedient way of saying immediate withdrawal. Their proposal, which calls for departu http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=68 2006-11-17 13:11:36 Everyone knows that liberals love Starbucks. A 2005 Zogby poll found that partisans of the left were twice as likely to go to the world music-playing, fair trade-embracing, Seattle-based coffee chain as they were to patronize Dunkin' Donuts--a well-known http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=66 2006-11-17 11:11:57 In Sociobiology, the received view is that living things compete with each other (more precisely, their constituent genes struggle with alternative copies) in a never-ending process of differential reproduction, using their bodies as vehicles, or tools, f http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=65 2006-11-17 11:11:01 Until recently it was assumed that the “you” in YouTube referred to college kids with a compulsive need to procrastinate. Media-obsessives anxious to keep track of the hot new joke or political gaffe. Exhibitionists and their friends. Lovers of humiliatio http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=64 2006-11-17 03:11:21 Brosnan was always more persuasive playing Bond as a metaphoric rather than an actual lady-killer. Every generation gets the Bond it deserves if not necessarily desires, and with his creased face and uneasy smile, Mr. Craig fits these grim times well. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=63 2006-11-17 02:11:34 Many have been waiting for evidence of anti-American bias on the new channel; that was non-existent on the first day. The emphasis is on the third world: The presidential elections in Congo is all the rage; and not a single word about Japanese tsunami. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=61 2006-11-16 08:11:25 In the West, gradual de-industrialization has created a new underclass of the unproductive and intellectually depraved. The spiritual cousin of the American phenomenon of "white trash," these strangers in their own land have become a serious threat to dem http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=60 2006-11-16 02:11:15 Bible assigns Israel a pivotal role as a harbinger of the second coming. When evangelicals interpret passages from Revelation and Ezekiel, conflict between Israel and Iran may be a sign that that time is approaching. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=59 2006-11-17 10:11:43 "How a scientist changed the way we think", edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley. The collection includes contributions from a variety of writers, including the novelist Philip Pullman, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and John Krebs. Their essays cover not http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=58 2006-11-14 17:11:26 What distinguishes Tierney from his colleagues is that his worldview orders almost every thought, even the apolitical ones. Why did Lawrence Summers encounter trouble at Harvard? Because Harvard's faculty is an entrenched bureaucracy insulated from market http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=57 2006-11-14 14:11:45 Elections are also unlikely to bring major economic changes, because when it comes to macroeconomic questions Democrats and Republicans are simply not that far apart. Republicans like to indict Democrats as anti-corporate zealots. But in 1994, when the De http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=56 2006-11-14 08:11:08 We’ve got men dying at higher rates of just about every disease, and we don’t know why. Trying to explain this fact by pointing to men's lifestyle choices proved to be not correct. But the mere suggestion that men need to advocate their health shortcomin http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=55 2006-11-14 17:11:30 New Statesman-a leftist weekly-makes the profound observation that the Kazakh reporter exposes crass Americana. But that's not even close. What Borat exposes is that Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse. The only people who ar http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=53 2006-11-14 02:11:40 Under the Erdogan administration, Alevis fear the rise of a new government-backed, Sunni fundamentalism with strong similarities to the official Wahhabi cult in Saudi Arabia. Turkey is getting worse; and as we see in Iraq, fighting among Muslims can be b http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=52 2006-11-13 13:11:36 A reform of Islam? What if the reform has already taken place and jihadism is it? Those who call for a Muslim reformation in the spirit of the Christian Reformation ignore the obvious flaw in the analogy--that Muslims have the advantage of knowing where r http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=51 2006-11-13 13:11:14 The well-known doctrine of dualism sits uneasily with the better half of Descartes philosophy, and is aimed at providing support for the Catholic belief in the immortality of the soul. And philosophers are advised just to ignore http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=50 2006-11-13 12:11:21 Both realism and progressivism have become misnomers. Realists deny reality, and embrace an ideology where talk is productive and governments are sincere. By embracing such realism, progressives sacrifice their core liberalism. Baker-Hamilton commission http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=49 2006-11-13 03:11:47 Speaking on September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh accused American Jews of trying to thrust the U.S. into a war with Germany: “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=48 2006-11-12 18:11:07 Take my lodging: the Grand Hôtel de Londres, built in 1892 to accommodate the waves of European tourists arriving via the Orient Express. Over the last 114 years, its fortunes have waxed (Hemingway stayed here in 1922) and waned (when chains like Hilton a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=47 2006-11-12 11:11:15 Whatever racism remains in the country, it coexists with a galloping desire to put that old race stuff behind us, to have a national Goodbye to All That moment. The most recent such occasion was Obama's much-publicized tour to promote his book of policy p http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=46 2006-11-12 10:11:25 To be fair, Madonna probably has a lot of other reasons for bringing a young African child back with her to London. But there is a religious component at work as well. A recent photo of Madonna's adopted African boy, revealed him sporting a Kabbalah tell- http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=45 2006-11-12 05:11:01 Speculation that if spurned by Europe, Turkey would embrace the likes of Iran is so far proving wrong. Turkish premier and the top brass are competing to get America's blessings on their sides. Turkey may need American pressure one more time in keeping T http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=44 2006-11-11 03:11:27 A person's politics is not just a reflection of a person's origins, of course; but Judt's writing about Israel and its Jewish supporters is icily lacking in decency. No amount of sympathy for the interests of the Palestinians requires this amount of antip http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=42 2006-11-10 21:11:37 Babel belongs to a yet unnamed genre-'Crash' is the most prominent example-in which drama is created by the juxtaposition of distinct stories, rather than by the progress of a single narrative http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=41 2006-11-12 16:11:13 Grass caused outrage in Germany not because he revealed in his new memoir 'Peeling the Onion' that he had served in the Waffen-SS, but because he, who for much of his career had harassed politicians, intellectuals, and ordinary Germans into facing their N http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=40 2006-11-10 03:11:10 According to the butt and brush theory, the likelihood of a woman's being converted from a browser to a buyer is inversely proportional to the likelihood of her being brushed on her behind while she's examining merchandise. Touch-or brush or bump on the b http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=39 2006-11-09 03:11:21 Russians have a bumpy history of economic boom and bust. Their attitude to wealth is spend it while you’ve got it — buy a huge yacht, buy a dozen cars, get massive houses all over the world and have sex with as many beautiful girls as possible. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=38 2006-11-08 13:11:14 No fewer than 114 public intellectuals signed a letter published in the New York Review of Books, accusing ADL to threaten the Polish Consulate to cancel Judt's lectures. Is there a kosher stamp on the threath? The letter says: Yep, that's a jewish con http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=36 2006-11-08 13:11:44 Russell Crowe plays Max Skinner, an unscrupulous bond trader living in a dark and dreary London. Max inherits a Provençal property, Château La Siroque, from an uncle. And then Max falls in love with a french woman ... http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=35 2006-11-08 04:11:32 Kuczynski, who writes the critical shopper column for the Times, takes a tour through the plastic surgery industry, and opines that doctors who are too tan and have had bad hair transplants had to be distrusted http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=33 2006-11-06 09:11:05 True believers and tourists alike entrust their prayers to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. Now they don't even have to go there -- they can visit on the Internet and send prayers by e-mail. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=32 2006-11-06 04:11:39 The bad news is that the new "Joy of Cooking" forces a decision. Which “Joy” do we want? Do we keep our mother’s vintage copy from the ’60s? The reliable and popular version from 1975? The smart, chef-driven 1997 book? Or do we clean house, get with the t http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=31 2006-11-06 03:11:42 No one can say for sure whether O.E.D.3 will ever be published in paper and ink. By the point of decision, not before 20 years or so, it will have doubled in size yet again. In the meantime, it is materializing before the world’s eyes, bit by bit, online. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=30 2006-11-05 14:11:30 New York Review of Books: Google's Book Search Project with its commitment to digitize as amany as 20 million titles from the collections of major libraries will raise the theoretical possiblity that every book ever printed in whatever language may ind http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=28 2006-11-05 00:00:00 To the many indignities visited upon shorter than average males — lower incomes, disadvantage in mate selection— has now been added this one: short people are stupider than tall people. That’s the finding of a recent study by two Princeton economists who http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=27 2006-11-07 08:11:07 Andrew Sullivan is one of the best bloggers in the world, and for a time, he saw the war on terror as Bush did, as a comprehensive war against an extremist ideology, and he fervently supported the invasion of Iraq. But during 2004 Sullivan grew disenchant http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=26 2006-11-04 00:00:00 Sen. Kerry and his party should publicly demand that the U.S. military be allowed to recruit openly on elite campuses. And the supposed reason for the ban on ROTC--the continuing refusal of the armed services to admit known homosexuals--should be dispelle http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=25 2006-11-04 00:00:00 The fact that the heroines’ feelings are presented as open and raw does not make “Volver” any less of a concoction—a half-camp, half-noble dream of female solidarity, any grains of bitchiness tossed aside like salt. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=23 2006-11-04 00:00:00 On Visit from the glorious nation of Kazakhstan, Borat mistakes the elevator for his hotel room, poops in front of a Trump tower, fancy himself looking into a Victoria’s Secret store, and enthuses about the Final Solution. His anti-semitism is unsettling http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=22 2006-11-07 19:11:06 Read in light of Joseph Ratzinger's ecclesiastical career, the Regensburg address looks less like an attack on Islam and more like an attack on secular Europe. For Pope Benedict, the true battle is not between Islam and the West, but rather within the Wes http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=21 2006-11-02 00:00:00 After more than a decade messing about writing some fine essays and autobiography mixed in with poor fiction and some questionable history, Martin Amis has suddenly—and unexpectedly, even to his publishers—turned in "House of Meetings", a novel about two http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=16 2006-11-01 00:00:00 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is often smiling, as if he knows something we don't, or at least not yet. It is tempting to view him as a madman. Unfortunately, whether mad or not, Ahmadinejad has a coherent ideological vision in which the call to w http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=15 2006-11-01 00:00:00 John Updike's new novel, which is about a Muslim teenager tempted to become a suicide bomber, is surely a harbinger: in the next few years, one of the central novelistic subjects will be religious fundamentalism and its relation to Western secular society http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=14 2006-11-01 00:00:00 The new yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert reviews Taner Akcam's new monograph "A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility”. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=13 2006-11-03 00:00:00 Many Jews subscribe to a folk theory that attributes Jewish intelligence to what would have to be the weirdest example of sexual selection in the living world: that for generations in the shtetl, the brightest yeshiva boy was betrothed to the daughter of http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=11 2006-11-01 00:00:00 As the impasse over Iran’s nuclear-weapons program grows inexorably into a crisis, a kind of consensus has taken root in the minds of America’s foreign-policy elite. This is that military action against Iran is a sure formula for disaster. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=10 2006-11-01 00:00:00 All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, thes http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=9 2006-11-01 00:00:00 James Wood reviews the recent recent novel by Michel Houellebecq, the protagonist of which is an outrageous professional comedian, who likes to splatter his venom all over delicate topics like the Middle East: one of his best-known films is a parody of a http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=8 2006-11-01 00:00:00 If Jesus had children (as claimed in Brown's Da Vinci Code) and if those children had children so that Jesus' lineage survived, then Jesus is today the ancestor of almost everyone living on Earth. Why? Steve Olson explains ... http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=7 2006-11-01 00:00:00 Amazon lists 3,865 books under "consciousness," a number of them new releases of the last year or two. What exactly is the problem of consciousness? John Searle explains ... http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=6 2006-11-01 00:00:00 Sunday book review for Alex Kuczynski's recent book "Beauty Junkies" http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=5 2006-11-01 00:00:00 Pigeons are winged rats dispensing 25 pounds of disease spreading poop a year. Pigeon-related damage in America is considerable. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=3 2006-11-01 00:00:00 There’s this island and it’s ruled by women. Most of them are blond, and a lot of them are twins, and they have all this honey, and these wild costumes. http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=2 2006-11-01 00:00:00 Reading Pinker, you would hardly know that Whose Freedom? raised deep and important questions and made serious, concrete proposals. With respect to cognitive science, there is one grand: Can you comprehend twenty-first century politics with a seventeenth- http://www.factsandideas.com/detail.php?id=1 2006-11-01 00:00:00