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During the first session of my first class in college, the professor warned me and my classmates against the worst sin a graduate student can commit: trying to demonstrate how badly we are. were smart in destroying the books we had to read. He called it “the steamroller technique” and emphatically said that if these …

This overlooks the possibility that it is culture, rather than race, that is being portrayed. Qualities such as “always fantastically proud”, assuming they exist, would seem unlikely to be of racial origin. Would it indeed be unwittingly racist to think that racial origin is what is claimed? Generalizing from there, is it possible to criticize …

Slavery was officially abolished in Qatar in the 1950s, but in 2010, when the resource-rich nation won the right to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, human rights groups were quick to point out that the country’s shiny new sites were still being built with “labor slaves.” A decade later, and with only a year …

November 13, 2021 BAND FAR THE The youngest of Aaron Beck’s subjects, in the very partial list of patients he had treated for anxiety and phobias in his book “Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders” (1976), was an eight-year-old boy. This boy, after weeks in the hospital with near-fatal sepsis, became horribly disgusted with blood, …

Superb cabins and huts around the world (Image credit: Cristobel Palma / Cabin Fever, Gestalten) From a Nordic pine cabin to a jewel treehouse, the homecoming refuge is booming. Why is the remote booth so perfect right now, asks Clare Dowdy. W What do rural cabins offer us that we can’t get at home? They …

New Zealand qualify for the semi-finals. India will pack up and go home. Another ICC event failure for the game’s superpower, this time in the group stage. With their cultured dismantling of Afghanistan in a virtual quarterfinal, the Kiwis have shown why they more than deserve to reach the bottom four at the expense of …

One thing everyone agrees on is that sleep, and REM sleep in particular, is important. On the one hand, evolution would not have fostered such a dangerous activity – in which we are disconnected from reality, ducks sitting for accidents or predators – if it had not been profoundly useful for survival. It cannot be …

At some point last year, I bought a used copy of “Camera Lucida”. In this slim text, the French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes exposes his theory of photography as a collaboration between the spectator and the watched, centered on what Barthes calls the punctum: the (often marginal) detail that springs from an image …