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Link The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course…
There has been a rash of books on human evolution in recent years, claiming that it was driven by art (Denis Dutton: The Art Instinct), cooking (Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire),…

23 Hours, 12 Minutes ago | Comments
Link Forget those creative writing workshops. If you want…
One of the side-effects of having your work appear in a public forum such as this is that people often email me asking for advice on how to break into…

August 18 2010, 2:13am | Comments
Link The internet: is it changing the way we…
Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". "Over the…

August 16 2010, 2:46am | Comments
Link Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard
Writers have long been fascinated by machinery – what it gives and what it takes away. Tom McCarthy, whose experimental work has been hailed as the future of fiction, charts…

July 25 2010, 7:13am | Comments
Link Plato's stave: academic cracks philosopher's musical code
It may sound like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, but an academic at the University of Manchester claims to have cracked a mathematical and musical code in the…

July 20 2010, 2:45am | Comments
Link Everything you need to know about the internet
The internet: Everything you ever need to know In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown.…

June 21 2010, 3:38am | Comments
Link My bright idea: Guy Deutscher
Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the…

June 13 2010, 5:33am | Comments
Link Writing off the UK's last palaeographer
Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently…

May 29 2010, 10:04am | Comments
Link Christopher Hitchens re-reads Animal Farm
Animal Farm, as its author later wrote, "was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose…

April 26 2010, 4:49am | Comments
Link 'It's time to let you hear the song…
Aged 17, I set about writing a song for a girl I was obsessed with. When she heard it, she called the police. Have a listen – you'll understand why.…

April 9 2010, 3:34am | Comments
Link The new Buddhist atheism
In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes of Buddhism as the sleep of reason, and of Buddhists as discarding their minds as well as their sandals. His passionate diatribe…

March 21 2010, 12:52pm | Comments
Link Theology for atheists
Theology lets us talk about deep and irrational urges. This is seen by some atheists as weakness. But maybe it's a strength as well James Wood, a writer who himself…

January 8 2010, 3:29am | Comments
Link The dark side of the internet
In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography. The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of…

December 8 2009, 8:14am | Comments
Link Atheism: class is a distraction
For some reasons it seems to be anathema to say that there might be an intrinsic reason for the correlation between educational level and the rejection of religion: atheism takes…

October 15 2009, 8:14am | Comments
Wikipedia Wikipedia enters a new chapter Yet again, Wikipedia is about to break new ground. The website that has become one of the biggest open repositories of knowledge is due – within the next…

September 28 2009, 9:10am | Comments

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