Month: January 2020

• This thing of darkness

  I’m starting to wonder if I was misled during those halcyon days on my father’s knee. It was a time when heroes and villains were easily recognizable -like the white and black hats on the cowboys in the movies that were in vogue then. Apparently, I needed to know who to root for when I […]

  gozzter

  January 29, 2020

  Uncategorized

  Aeon.co, Catherine Nichols, Cinderella, folk tales, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, good vs evil, Grimm brothers, Icelandic Edda, Maria Tatar, myths, oral traditions, stories, the Iliad

• Of thinking too precisely on the event

  The right not to know -now there’s an interesting concept in today’s competition for instant news, ‘breaking stories’, and the ever present titillation of factoids. It seems almost counterintuitive -why would anyone choose not to know something? Surely knowledge trumps ignorance. Surely Hamlet’s timeless question ‘Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings […]

  gozzter

  January 22, 2020

  Uncategorized

  Aeon.co, autonomy, Beneficence, DNA testing, Emily Willingham, ethics, Hamlet, medical research, medicine, the right not to know, UK Biobank

• More than kin and less than kind

  Am I really the me I think I am -the cogito ergo sum I have been led to believe? Or have I been naïve all these years in assuming my identity rests solely inside somewhere -in the uniqueness of my brain, maybe, or in the peculiarities of my experiences that no one else could ever […]

  gozzter

  January 15, 2020

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  Abeba Birhane, Aeon.co, Descartes, landlords, me, Mikhail Bakhtin, rent controls, solitary confinement, tenants, University College Dublin

• Here’s ado to lock up honesty

  Sometimes I think we want to simplify things too much; we crave bichromality: on or off, yes or no. We want certainty, not a spectrum. An answer, not another question -a decision, in other words. And yet if we stop to look around, it seems obvious that things are seldom black or white -there are […]

  gozzter

  January 8, 2020

  Uncategorized

  Aeon, Aeon.co, colours, communication, consent, ethical sex, felicity norms, Georgetown University, intent, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, meaning, negotiation, propriety norms, Rebecca Kukla, relationships, safe words, sexual dialogue, sexual language, sexuality, speech act theory, words

• Lying down in green pastures

  I suppose I should admit something from the start: I’m not particularly religious, and I certainly do not have anything but the most superficial knowledge of Biblical writing. Still, I have come to appreciate the glory of metaphor and how it is able to transmute otherwise ineffable concepts into words. Feelings. Poetry, of course, aspires […]

  gozzter

  January 1, 2020

  Uncategorized

  ‘Old Testament’, Aeon.co, ancient Hebrew, Bible, Biblical scholarship, Hebrew bible, language, metaphor, poetry, Psalm 23, religion, Robert Alter, sound-play, the prophet Isaiah, University of California Berkeley, word-play