Author: Julian Baggini

Do we need emotional intelligence?

The Shrink and The Sage

The biggest problem with multiplying intelligences is that it opens the door for people to deflect criticisms on the basis that the critic simply lacks the appropriate one. “Spiritual intelligence”, for instance, cannot be a straightforward capacity since there is wide disagreement about what it means to be spiritual and whether all sorts of allegedly spiritual phenomena are real. Yet on some definitions, a materialist atheist would simply be spiritually thick. A substantive, contentious worldview can thus be disguised as an objective cognitive capacity. A clever move, but not one that can be described as truly intelligent.

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We want it all. And we want it now.

Articles & Essays, Food

Seventy-five years ago, the tinkling of a spoon in a cup signalled the dawn of a new cultural epoch. After seven years of research at a laboratory in Switzerland, the scientist Max Morgenthaler had perfected the technique of spray-drying liquid coffee into a soluble powder. And so on 1 April 1938, the world’s first instant coffee, Nescafé, was launched and from then on instantaneity came to permeate almost every aspect of our lives…

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