Culture

Global Mail reports: Tucked away in the sandstone ridges of the rugged tropics near Australia’s north-eastern tip, the ochre “bullymen” with their big penises and staring eyes still cling to the rock. These are secret paintings, made by Aboriginal men who were driven from their lowlands by colonials hungry for gold, and who were then [...]

Wade Davis: “If human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be and must be the facilitators of cultural survival.”

Al Jazeera describes this as an interview but it’s more of a debate — the New Statesman‘s Mehdi Hasan doesn’t give Dawkins an easy ride. The world’s most prominent militant atheist suffers from the same disease that afflicts all other evangelists: a lack of curiosity about the very people they hope to change. The mission [...]

Ron Rosenbaum writes: The counter­revolution has its embattled forward outpost on a genteel New York street called Irving Place, home to Lapham’s Quarterly. The street is named after Washington Irving, the 19th-century American author best known for creating the Headless Horseman in his short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The cavalry charge that Lewis [...]

Ken Tucker writes: Robert Hughes, not only one of the greatest art critics, but one of the greatest critics in any medium, has died. He was 74. The Australian-born Hughes was the art critic for Time Magazine starting in 1970, the author of the bestselling history of Australia, The Fatal Shore, and was the writer, [...]

On the tricentenary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s birth, Terry Eagleton writes: Much of what one might call the modern sensibility was this thinker’s creation. It is in Rousseau’s writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated [...]

Decca Aitkenhead interviews Slavoj Žižek: At the risk of upsetting Žižek’s fanatical global following, I would say that a lot of his work is impenetrable. But he writes with exhilarating ambition and his central thesis offers a perspective even his critics would have to concede is thought-provoking. In essence, he argues that nothing is ever [...]

Bob Randall, a Yankunytjatjara elder from Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) in Australia points out the simple conceit upon which our destructive relationship with this planet is based: the idea that the land on which we depend belongs to us. Randall describes what in many ways is the universal indigenous experience of a sense of place: that [...]

David Sirota writes: Would Americans eat less meat, and would animals be treated more humanely, if slaughterhouses were made with glass walls and we all could see the monstrous killing apparatus at work? This is the query at the heart of Timothy Pachirat’s new book Every Twelve Seconds — the title a reference to the [...]

Alain de Botton, an atheist, argues that rather than mocking religion, atheists and agnostics should steal the best ideas from world religions, such as the methods for building strong communities, overcoming envy, and forging a connection to the natural world. The philosopher essayist discusses his concepts with former seminarian and author Chris Hedges. Watch a [...]

The Guardian: “My dad was a slightly stricter version of Richard Dawkins,” says Alain de Botton. “The worldview was that there are idiots out there who believe in Santa Claus and fairies and magic and elves and we’re not joining that nonsense.” In his new book, Religion for Atheists, he recalls his father reducing his [...]