This essay was first published by Areo magazine on 23 November 2018.  Science traditionally aspires to be universal in two respects. First, it seeks fundamental knowledge—facts which are universally true. Second, it aims to be impersonal in practice; identity should be irrelevant to the process by which a scientific claim is judged. Since the era … Continue reading Testing the limits of universalism in science

This review was first published by Arc Digital on 25 October 2018. There is something immensely comforting about Yuval Noah Harari. In an era when a writer’s success often depends on a willingness to provoke, Harari’s calling cards are politeness and equanimity. In the new class of so-called “rock star intellectuals,” he is analogous to … Continue reading Yuval Noah Harari’s half-baked guide to the 21st century

In his latest book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, Steven Pinker heaps a fair amount of scorn on Romanticism, the movement in art and philosophy which spread across Europe during the late-18th and 19th centuries. In Pinker’s Manichean reading of history, Romanticism was the malign counterstroke to the Enlightenment: its … Continue reading What was Romanticism? Putting the “counter-Enlightenment” in context

This essay was first published by Little Atoms on 09 August 2018. The image on my homepage is a detail from an original illustration by Jacob Stead. You can see the full work here. Until recently it seemed safe to assume that what most people wanted on social media was to appear attractive. Over the … Continue reading Social media’s turn towards the grotesque