Francis Wheen
Crystal Balls-Up
Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe Them Anyway
By Dan Gardner
Virgin Books 306pp £11.99 order from our bookshop
Is there any Schadenfreude more exquisite than seeing a prophet take a pratfall? When George Santayana wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, he should have added: those who claim to know the future are condemned to make fools of themselves.
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Enjoying Susan Owens’s essay on English attitudes to nature in @Lit_Review. Turns out the early moderns were positively repulsed by hills, as described in this poem by Isaak Walton’s fishing chum Charles Cotton.
In this month's Silenced Voices, @lucyjpop shines a light on the tragic case of Shady Habash, a filmmaker who died in an Egyptian prison in May.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/shady-habash
One study found that hoarders 'had lesions on the mesial prefrontal cortex of their brains ... Collecting and hoarding, in other words, are the results of brain damage.'
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https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness