“The debate about problem drinking and how to stop it nowadays centres mostly on the working-class young. They are highly visible – and audible – as they clog city centres on Saturday nights. But … Philip Withington, a Cambridge historian, argues that it was the educated elite who taught Britons how to drink to excess.”
Tag: 12.31.11
Textual Study Of The Koran Starts To Get Daring
“The Koran may be interpreted but from a believer’s viewpoint, nothing in it can be set aside. Yet, at least in the calm, superficially courteous world of Western academia, debating the precise text of the Koran” – and, more crucially, how that text varied in its early versions – “is increasingly common.”
If Your Memories Can Be Altered, Does That Change Who You Are?
“Common understandings of memory centrally involve the idea that memories are unreliable, fickle and capricious. But there is another belief about memory that has been articulated by many figures in memory research: that in some fundamental way, secreted within us are perfect records of past experiences, even if we might never access them consciously.”
Do We Need To Redefine What It Means To Be “Published”?
“An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.”