Young Bucky was... influenced by one strong female ancestor, his great-aunt Margaret Fuller... Her platform for change was the written word, and in conjunction with her good friend the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller founded the Transcendentalist literary magazine The Dial... Although she died decades before Bucky’s birth, Margaret Fuller’s influence endured within the Fuller …

The Bailey review into placating parental anxiety (at least, that seems to be how its creators would like us to understand it) has now been published, and as expected its recommendations include one to the effect that ‘the Internet industry should ensure that customers must make an active choice over what sort of content they want …

New College of the Humanities (NCH) will offer the ‘highest-quality’ education to ‘gifted’ undergraduates, its creators say... The college will prepare undergraduates for degrees in law, economics, history, philosophy and English literature. Students will also take three ‘intellectual skills’ modules in science literacy, logic and critical thinking and applied ethics.
B.B.C. News

Is the high level of risk-aversion we keep seeing related to candidates’ anticipated future prospects? (‘Pedestrian’ is the word one of the senior staff has been kicking around for the past couple of years; ‘workmanlike’ tends to be mine. It’s not outright flawed work, but it’s targetting adequacy when many candidates could be showing more evidence …

When culinary traditions can be formally recognised as significant cultural heritage, it was only a matter of time before U.N.E.S.C.O. found itself having to consider the possibility of digital world heritage. Assuming that a website occupies a suitable level of individuation to begin with, I’d have favoured Archive.org, but in fact it’s Wikipedia that’s being proposed …

But agriculture experts were unable to explain why chemical-free melons were exploding. They cited the weather and abnormal size of the melon as factors... [One farmer] said he had used chemicals to boost their growth on 6 May, and the following day more than 180 melons exploded. Mr Liu was reported to be the only farmer …

What’s in a name?

I think one of my correspondents is sulking. People sometimes do after having it explained to them in practically scholarly detail why they were wrong to take umbrage in the first place.

Mordor Investments Limited

Keele may have got a reprieve, but with impeccable timing, managers at Greenwich have decided to debase themselves in turn:

‘To support individuals living in Yorkshire and The Humber regions who have sustained an acquired brain .’

Can completing a book affect or reflect its cultural ties?

According to the Provisional Schedule in the first English printing of bolo’bolo we should now all be living happily in bolos..., enjoying hospitality everywhere, working some, playing some, sleeping some and not worrying about anything. Nation-states, armies, big companies, 9-to-5 jobs..., etc. should be no more than dim memories... [and there should be] a patchwork of …

How much of history is lost to illegible handwriting; and how much of the rest is reliably transcribed? Scholars of the Eldarin languages must endure the uncertainties of Tolkien’s occasional scrawl. Peter Gast was reputedly the only one who could interpret Nietzsche’s hand once the latter’s vision had deteriorated. To learn to read Goebbels’ handwriting is …

The world doesn’t change when your feelings do; and how slowly we come to terms with that! As children we learnt that there were other thinking beings like ourselves, and a world to share with them; although a person decades older may be found dropping the most carefully disguised of hints, then growing frustrated with those …