The question of whether someone can be too intelligent in any sense is entirely hypothetical in my own case. And lack of intelligence is a much more serious and common problem than too much of it. Nonetheless, it’s worth remembering that even intelligence can be excessive, as a reminder that just because something is good, that does not mean more of it is always better.
ReadFor the Frenchman Marcel Proust, the elixir of memory might have been a petite madeleine, but that wouldn’t work on British-bred me. What I needed was a can of Heinz cream of mushroom soup and a packet of Sainsbury’s cheese and onion crisps. As I gathered these and other long-neglected childhood foodstuffs from the supermarket shelves, I thought surely one sniff, one taste would be enough to take me right back. But to what, exactly? And how?
ReadPsychologists and risk experts are always telling us that we fixate far too much on unusual dangers and not enough on the hazards that we confront every day. The Glasgow helicopter crash will no doubt provide another opportunity to highlight our supposed irrationality as people demand inquiries to avoid a repeat of an accident that killed at least eight people, while five people die every day on the UK’s roads. But is it really illogical to worry about unusual causes of death and serious injury? I’m not convinced it is…
ReadIt’s time to rewrite the story of the financial crisis. Far from being a disaster movie, it was in fact a tale of salvation. As for the green shoots of recovery we are now seeing, they are virulent weeds to be stamped out…
ReadBack in 1977, Alexander Cockburn coined the term “gastroporn” to describe the way in which looking at food and cooking provides a kind of substitute pleasure – and a titillation – for actually eating. The cinema has been a rich source of another kind of gastroporn, a fantasy world in which we watch the sometimes literal coming together of food and sex. It has provided some wonderful movie moments as well as some truly cringeworthy ones, but it provides as little insight into actual sex as Oompa-Loompas do into the day-to-day working lives of chocolatiers.
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