Night Waves
NIGHT WAVES, BBC RADIO 3. Read a 5-minute essay on the inconceivable on the May 20 programme, which you can listen[…]
ReadTag: Politics & society
Criminal minds
Adrian Raine is surely right that we cannot ignore the evidence that points to the importance of neurological factors in violent crime. If he shouts a little too loudly about the brain’s role, it is because that voice needs to be heard. In The Anatomy of Violence, it comes across clearly, powerfully and often persuasively.
ReadOn humility
Like modesty, humility is something that, if professed, is self-refuting. True humility is expressed in deeds, not words. The humble are those who truly walk the same ground as everyone else, not necessarily with grovelling, hunched backs but certainly not lording it over others either. What we need is more such genuine humility in public life, and hear less of it in extremis. The truly humble feel the ground beneath their feet every day and do not only become aware of it when held aloft or pushed down to their knees.
ReadWe want it all. And we want it now.
Seventy-five years ago, the tinkling of a spoon in a cup signalled the dawn of a new cultural epoch. After seven years of research at a laboratory in Switzerland, the scientist Max Morgenthaler had perfected the technique of spray-drying liquid coffee into a soluble powder. And so on 1 April 1938, the world’s first instant coffee, Nescafé, was launched and from then on instantaneity came to permeate almost every aspect of our lives…
ReadTo profit, don’t just concentrate on profit
So important is trade for human life as we know it that we could credibly define our species as homo cambiens: humans who exchange. There is, however, a competing form of humanity: homo economicus. For homo cambiens, trade is about people and things; for homo economicus, it is only about the maximisation of profit. What homo economicus doesn’t realise, however, is that sustainable profit needs homo cambiens.
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