WINNER OF THE 2015 TRANSMISSION PRIZE. The Salon London Transmission Prize recognizes speakers’ work to reach a wider audience and has been been split between two winners this year– Margaret Heffernan and Julian Baggini. … Baggini, author of The Virtues of the Table (Granta), takes on people’s obsessions, preconceptions and need for food and giving audiences philosophical answers in his presentation.
ReadWhat makes us feel better faster isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. To move on too quickly is surely to teach people entirely the wrong lesson: that behaving badly is no big deal, because people soon get over it anyway.
ReadPhilosophy is only rarely transformative, being neither a good cure for misery nor, thankfully, a cause of it.
ReadImagine living in a community where people stay for anything from between a few weeks to a few months, where each member has a skill that she will teach to others and contributes work, not money. Its founder, the science writer Dylan Evans, describes it in The Utopia Experiment as “a cross between Plato’s Academy and The Beach”. It ended up more like Lord of the Flies meets I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. Within a year of his arrival in 2006, Evans found himself in a psychiatric hospital, his savings spent and his long-crossed bridges from academia smouldering in the distance. Evans’s account is a gripping, slow-motion car-crash. You can’t take your eyes off it, try as you might to hide them behind your hands.
ReadAnyone tempted to put the mockers on the rockers should remember that no one understands the absurdities of heavy rock like its fans and practitioners. You certainly can’t accuse Blue Öyster Cult of lacking a sense of irony when their opening song is “This ain’t the summer of love”, which they follow with another containing the line “Our best years have passed us by”. They even play “Godzilla”, inviting the taunt that they are dinosaurs, or even as Wishbone Ash’s Martin Turner’s kids call him, rock fossils.
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