Month: December 2013

Wealthy immigrants in North Yorkshire

Crisis Magazine reports on the unusual results that may occur when re-examining skeletons dug up a century ago in York: Upper-crust Africans living in a dismal Imperial backwater like 4th century Britannia? That’s odd More here, and yet more on the ‘Ivory Bangle Lady’ at The Independent, and Yorkshire Museum.

1984:Big Brother::We:The Benefactor

How original is Orwell’s 1984? We is set in a dystopian society, where our protagonist is introduced to Freedom by the local Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Both are eventually caught and everything returns, more or less, to how it was. Sound familliar? The plot to 1984 seems to have been lifted, almost entirely it seems,…

Read the full article

Is Zeus poor?

The voice of Poverty, in Aristophanes’ Plutus (408 BC): Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.…

Read the full article

Drinking wine in an MRI

How to measure the effect that price has on perceptions of pleasure? Although researchers have used fMRI scans in recent years to gauge brain activity, the study is one of the first to test subjects as they swallow liquid—in this case, wine—through a pump attached to their mouths More here. This research was supported with…

Read the full article