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Those students who argue for No Platform seem to be in two camps. The first suffer from some sort of Kim Jong Il-esque paranoia that the BNP or Islamofascists are at the gates of our university campuses just awaiting the opportunity to turn the nation’s students racist. This patronisingly assumes that students are an uncritically receptive bunch capable of being whipped into a crazed mob at the merest hint of BNP or Islamist rhetoric. 

The other camp of students in favour of No Platform, while less obviously hysterical than their fellow no-platformers, is in fact far more insidious. This group talks of creating a safe space to ensure that people do not feel intimidated or feel unable to make their voices heard. They point out that if ‘dangerous radicals’, in this case Hizb ut-Tahrir, are allowed to debate on the same platform, many people might not be able to ‘access’ the events. They’ll feel excluded, picked on. The types of student that need protection from such radical views range from the traditional, such as black students or women, right through to the absurd, such as socialist or ‘nervous’.

Yet I have seen black, women and even nervous students take the stand, as I have myself at the NUS annual conference, and say ‘I don’t want or need your “protection”’. And they have argued this for a good reason. The idea of ‘protection’ assumes that people have a right not to be offended, that they have a right not to hear students with views influenced by Hizb ut-Tahrir. But there is no right not to be offended. Why should there be? These are students after all; they are at university to experience new and often offensive ideas.

But not all documentaries take such a novel approach. Randy Olson, a marine biologist-turned-filmmaker at the University of Southern California, is a harsh critic of what he sees as a very literal-minded, information-heavy approach within the environmental film genre. Well-intentioned environmental documentary filmmakers are just “making their same, boring, linear, one-dimensional explorations of issues,” said Olson. “The public’s not buying it.”

The problem may run deeper than audience tallies — after all, An Inconvenient Truth currently ranks as the sixth-highest grossing documentary in the United States. However, a 2010 study by social psychologist Jessica Nolan found that while the film increased viewers’ concern about global warming, that concern didn’t translate into any substantial action a month later.

To move a larger audience to action, Olson advocates a shift from the literal-minded world of documentary into the imaginative world of narrative.

The trite official theme of the movie - the evils of narrow-minded prejudice - could have sunk the whole project. But as in a lot of compelling fiction, the official theme of Crash contradicts the details of the story. If you are paying attention, it soon becomes obvious that virtually none of the characters suffer from "narrow-minded prejudice." No one makes up their grievances out of thin air. Instead, the characters mostly engage in statistical discrimination. They generalize from their experience to form stereotypes about the members of different ethnic groups (including their own!), and act on those stereotypes when it is costly to make case-by-case judgments (as it usually is). In the story, moreover, stereotypes are almost invariably depicted as statistically accurate. Young black men are more likely to be car thieves; white cops are more likely to abuse black suspects; and Persians have bad tempers. Of course, the story also makes the point that some members of these groups violate the stereotype. But that "insight" is basic to all statistical reasoning.

the rule in Crash is that busy people see others as average members of their groups until proven otherwise.

It is particularly interesting that Crash illustrates one of the deep truths of models of statistical discrimination: The real social conflict is not between groups, but within groups. People who are below-average for their group make life worse for people who are above-average for their group. Women who get job training and then quit to have children hurt the careers of single-minded career women, because they reduce the profitability of the average woman. This lesson is beautifully expressed in the scene where the successful black t.v. producer (Terrence Howard) chews out the black teen-ager (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) who unsuccessfully tried to car-jack him: You embarrass me. You embarrass yourself.

Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of “digital humanities,” but Moretti’s approach is among the more radical. He advocates what he terms “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

People recognize, say, Gothic literature based on castles, revenants, brooding atmospheres, and the greater frequency of words like “tremble” and “ruin.” Computers recognize Gothic literature based on the greater frequency of words like . . . “the.” Now, that’s interesting. It suggests that genres “possess distinctive features at every possible scale of analysis.” More important for the Lit Lab, it suggests that there are formal aspects of literature that people, unaided, cannot detect.

Distant reading might prove to be a powerful tool for studying literature, and I’m intrigued by some of the lab’s other projects, from analyzing the evolution of chapter breaks to quantifying the difference between Irish and English prose styles. But whatever’s happening in this paper is neither powerful nor distant. (The plot networks were assembled by hand; try doing that without reading Hamlet.) By the end, even Moretti concedes that things didn’t unfold as planned. Somewhere along the line, he writes, he “drifted from quantification to the qualitative analysis of plot.”

Although the atmosphere at the Troxy was very genial, and Žižek generally enthusiastic about WikiLeaks (as he was in the London Review of Books article he published about it), there was a distinct tension between the rather standard Enlightenment rhetoric employed by Assange (more facts, a more complete historical record, better educated journalists)  and the significantly more radical conclusions the philosopher was drawing. This is why - whilst it should no doubt be read in a similar light as Žižek’s own remarks on his position during the conversation (I feel now like that Stalinist commentator: the leader has spoken, I provide the deeper meaning) - the ventured analogy nevertheless contains a kernel of truth beyond its bombast: defining the emancipatory significance of phenomena should not be left to the actors alone.

in response to Goodman's initial question on the significance of the Iraq war logs, Assange primarily emphasized the concrete revelations WikiLeaks had provided. He mentioned the 400.000 cables leaked, 15.000 previously unreported deaths revealed, a video of an American helicopter mowing down civilians, and so on. In contrast, Žižek went far enough to say that even if WikiLeaks had not revealed a single new thing, it should be considered game-changing. Why? Because of the very way it functions. For the philosopher, our democracies not only have rules regarding what can be revealed, but also rules which regulate the transgression of those first rules (the independent press, NGOs, etc). The contention then is that WikiLeaks operates outside both these sets of rules, and that there is the source of its power.

the reply was firmly anchored in the key trope Žižek has championed since his first major work in English: that ideology in today's "post-ideological" world is not dead, but rather more powerful than ever - alive not so much on the level of knowledge but in the ways it structures social reality itself.

many hacks lift quotes and thats not a crime but Hari appears to be passing off copy-pasted text from Levy’s writings in Haaretz and interviews with other hacks as an exclusive interview

The quote is sewn together with a string of other ideas Levy may or may not have shared with Hari but at no point does Hari indicate the quotes are taken from elsewhere. While Hari has questions to answer over the quotes he claims were given directly to him he also seems to be freely creating mash-up quotes out of disparate statements levy has made over the years. Not the practice of an award winning hack.

Hari has issued a reply that fails to explain why quotes are passed off as having been said directly to him; When interviewing a writer for a 6000-word profile, accurately quoting their writing is not “plagiarism” or “cut & paste journalism” Perhaps he would do better to heed his own words from August 2010; You don’t have a choice about being wrong sometimes: mistakes will be your life-long companion. But you do have a choice about whether to approach your error in terror so you suppress, ignore and repeat it – or to make it your honest, open ally in trying to get to the truth.

Mr Murdoch's close henchman Les Hinton assured MPs that the affair had been dealt with and when, two years later, Mr Coulson – by now director of communications for David Cameron – appeared before a renewed parliamentary inquiry he seemed confident of being fireproof. "We did not use subterfuge of any kind unless there was a clear public interest in doing so," he told MPs. When Scotland Yard concluded that, despite more allegations of hacking, there was nothing new to investigate, Wapping and Mr Coulson must again have concluded the affair was over.

But after an election campaign in which the Conservatives were roundly supported by Mr Murdoch's papers, a succession of further claimants against the News of the World has come forward. Sienna Miller, among others, seems determined to take her case to court, compelling Mulcaire to reveal his handlers and naming in court documents Ian Edmondson, once one of Coulson's executives. Mr Edmondson is now suspended. But the story is unlikely to end there

When Rupert Murdoch came to England last October to deliver a lecture, there were some in the audience who raised eyebrows when the media mogul broke off from a paean to Baroness Thatcher to say of his journalists: "We will vigorously pursue the truth – and we will not tolerate wrongdoing." The latter comment seemed to refer to the long-running phone-hacking scandal involving the News of the World, the tabloid he has owned for 41 years. Mr Murdoch's executives at his British headquarters in Wapping, east London, tried to draw a veil over the paper's own dirty secrets in 2007 and had no doubt assured him that the matter was history. Yet here was the boss, four years later, having to vouch for his organisation's honesty. Related articles