The National Secular Society put out an alarming press release last week insisting that the “BBC must not become an evangelical wing of the Church of England“. Leaving aside whether the C of E now has wings, how great is this risk and how do the NSS’s arguments stack up?
Read the rest of this entry »
Mary Beard’s latest Don’s Life column refers to the current culture of risk aversion in university research funding. As someone who’s putting together a funding application for the ESRC (with almost zero chance of success, I should add) her words seem absolutely right to me:
the only way sensibly to be able to conform to the AHRC guidelines is to apply for money for research you’ve already done
Just a quick note on the Conservatives’ latest election poster. It’s not that it’s negative: I’m fine with negative campaigning, and I think the Tories, having been in opposition for a long time now, have every right to score points off the incumbent administration’s record.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been reading a fair bit of radical pedagogy (Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux etc) of late and seeing the word “emancipation” so many times that it started sticking out of the page and looking wrong. Then I read something in, of all places, Huddleston & Pullum that I think made sense of it for me.
Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday we walked the lower half of the Ravensbourne River in South East London, recording our impressions as we went. We began at Lewisham DLR station.
Read the rest of this entry »
Back in the summer Clare, her brother Mark and I visited the foot tunnel to take some photographs. There had been sometimes over-egged stories about the tunnel’s scheduled closure for works over the next year and our main intention was to document some of the details of the fabric of the place, not knowing how much might be “improved” when it re-opened.
Read the rest of this entry »
I ask because Andrew Brown has claimed it is in his CiF blog, and atheism campaigner Ariane Sherine has strongly disagreed. CiF Belief is an engine that runs on this debate, but it’s an angle I hadn’t thought of before so I thought it was worth chewing over.
Read the rest of this entry »
Reading yet again that the fractured forms of the twentieth century avant gardes were a response to the traumas of the first world war, I’m moved to wonder (a) why anyone thinks this is worth saying, since everyone knows it, and (b) why anyone thinks it’s right.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve heard the phrase “just a theory” applied in a few different contexts in recent weeks and thought it might be worth teasing out what we mean by “a theory” and what that little modifier “just” might mean.
Read the rest of this entry »
As far as I can tell, here’s what happened. Last year, a teenager calling himself (or possibly herself) Cartrain made some collages that included images of work by artist Damian Hirst. Somehow or other, they ended up on the 100artworks site. Hirst was not amused.
Hirst alerted the Design and Artists Copyright Society, which is the mechanism by which artists in the UK get paid for their intellectual property. The DACS took legal advice (I assume) and had solicitors’ letters sent to 100artworks, which capitulated and (oddly, to my eyes) handed over the original artwork to the DACS.
