Tuesday, October 23, 2012

WEB BOHEMIAN (Tuesday, October 23, 2012)

(1)- INSCRUTABLE THOREAU -- Many readers, faced with Thoreau’s enigmatic Yankee persona, have resorted to a kind of pop-culture shorthand for describing his life. But the full story of Thoreau’s life…

(2)- POLITICAL NUDGING -- “Nudging” is an evidence-based strategy that aims to influence people’s behaviour towards certain of David Cameron’s more benign policies, such as cutting energy use and reducing obesity.

(3)- SOCIETY DISCUSSIONS – The talk at the Obesity Society's annual meeting asked: Was it the soda, the sugar, the deluge of so-called empty calories that had made us so fat? Or…

(4)- THE NEW WOUNDED – They are those who suffer the kinds of wounds that psychoanalysis tends to avoid: ones resulting from brain lesions, battleground trauma, or Alzheimer's.

(5)- SOPHOCLES JARGONIZED -- What Sophoclean tragedy tells us is there are severe limitations to our lives and that it can be our very aspirations to transcend them and behave well that often bring about our downfall.

(6)- FACTS CHANGE -- Scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually since the 17th century. The upshot is that scientific data doubles every 15 years and stuff turns out to be untrue.

(7)- IS EVOLUTION WORTH THE CHALLENGE? – There’s a small group involving a handful of prominent senior philosophers expressing skepticism about aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

(8)- ISAIAH BERLIN -- Did his insistence on rationally irresolvable moral conflict support liberalism's affirmation of toleration or reduce it to one contender among a multitude of equally valid value systems?

(9)- STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY – It always risks seeming banal, and indeed, most of the photographs produced in portraiture's heyday now seem either rote or bland. But a few photographers made work that remains indelible.

POLITICAL CARTOON

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