Dickens Electrified / Catatonia From Catalonia / Unmasked Cochrane Report

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Helluva Twist — CHARLES DICKENS and his writings are still being “interrogated” (that’s the word in use) by scholars, at least one of whom is almost electrified by what might be there.Jeremy Parrott, an antiquarian bookseller […]

Emperor’s Missing Heart, Vibrant Gut, More Trivial Superpowers, Greenfieldwashing

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Find the emperor’s heart — Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great certainly wasn’t, in the purest medical sense, heartless. But now he is. The search is on to find his missing heart, though it isn’t abundantly […]

Rhizomic Digitized Surveillance Contradictions Mystery

For pure intellectual and verbal verve and daring, few fields of research rival that of Accounting Auditing Control. An audaciously provocative new example appears in the journal Accounting Auditing Control: “Rhizomic Digitized Surveillance, Contradictions, and Managerial Control Practice: Insights from the Société Générale Scandal,” by Aziza Laguecir and Bernard Leca (published in vol. 29, no. […]

Hypergunk, Nasal Warfare, and Musical-Taste Calcification

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Nihilism and hypergunk — Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism aren’t for everyone. Or maybe they are. Jonas Werner, a philosopher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, published a crisp, perhaps irresistible, 16-page-long jotting called “Irreducibly […]

Arachnonecrocapitalism / Climate change nasality / Collision siding / Trivial superpowers

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Arachnonecrocapitalism — The death of a spider in Texas has led to the birth of a philosophical movement, with Rice at both ends. This life-and-death saga began with a recent, almost instantly famous experiment at Rice University […]