Tag: The Guardian

How to break the stranglehold of academics on critical thinking:

more than ever, intellectuals should learn from the movements from below. This means not only supporting them “from outside” once they have occurred, as many have done, but conceiving of one’s intellectual activity as part and parcel of a collective intellectuality. Only then will the monopoly of academics on the production of influential critical theories be broken.

The secrets of the world’s happiest cities:

Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.

The Sun on Sunday lied about me last week. Have they learned nothing?

We are dealing with experts in propaganda who will stop at nothing to see their version of events prevail, and on the rare occasions when the truth emerges, like a hernia popping through gorged corpse, they apologise discreetly for their ignoble flatulence in a mouse-sized font for hippo-sized lies.

Russell Brand appears to be a lot more intelligent than I previously gave him credit for.

All Journalism Is Advocacy — Whither news?

Greenwald and the Guardian exhibited the highest value of journalism: intellectual honesty. That does not mean they were unbiased. It means they were willing to do damage to their political side in the name of truth.

Can the Guardian take its aggressive investigations global? Good read in the New Yorker about the Guardian and how it operates.

Michael Moore: I was the most hated man in America. This is what happens when you denounce the sitting president 4 days into an immensely popular war. Michael Moore writes about what happened after his Oscar acceptance speech.

Is this the end for books?

So, even if they now seem natural, the lengths and formats of books are but cultural accidents.

Sam Leith – Is this the end for books?

America’s ‘detainee 001’ – the persecution of John Walker Lindh. Superbly well-written article by John Walker Lindh’s father about his son’s decade long detainment by the U.S. Government. Quite sad, but powerful, to read at times.

The hypocrisy of the media attack on Wikileaks

Ian Dunt at The Guardian writes about the hypocrisy of the media attack on Wikileaks:

The only difference between Wikileaks and other news organisations is that Wikileaks is doing its job properly. This is not a symptom of its greater intelligence, merely its ability to comprehend the ramifications of new technology. Wikileaks is like a symbol of globalisation.