Articles & Essays – Page 96

Modern art: I could have done that… so I did

January 7, 2014 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

Be honest. If thinking “I could have done that” while walking around a contemporary art exhibition is the mark of a philistine, aren’t you a philistine, too? I know I am. Much as we may know that it’s not as easy as it looks to create a decent artwork, there are times when we come across something so simple, so unimpressive, and so devoid of technical merit that we just can’t help believing we could have done as well or better ourselves. What perhaps makes me unusual is not that I entertain such thoughts, but that I did go off and try doing it myself…

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The social animal

January 6, 2014 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

Human beings are born social. We live in families, tribes and nations, and increasingly as part of an interconnected global community. The problem is that these groups make different and often competing demands on us. We may well be social animals but our habitats are changing, and we haven’t yet adapted to them.

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Move your money

January 1, 2014 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

Mutuals offer a realistic vision of a better society that we can create without a revolution, without even an alternative model to the market economy. Capitalism is not the problem, it’s the actors in the capitalist system.

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Can you be too intelligent?

December 28, 2013 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

The question of whether someone can be too intelligent in any sense is entirely hypothetical in my own case. And lack of intelligence is a much more serious and common problem than too much of it. Nonetheless, it’s worth remembering that even intelligence can be excessive, as a reminder that just because something is good, that does not mean more of it is always better.

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The madeleine effect

December 5, 2013 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays, Food

For the Frenchman Marcel Proust, the elixir of memory might have been a petite madeleine, but that wouldn’t work on British-bred me. What I needed was a can of Heinz cream of mushroom soup and a packet of Sainsbury’s cheese and onion crisps. As I gathered these and other long-neglected childhood foodstuffs from the supermarket shelves, I thought surely one sniff, one taste would be enough to take me right back. But to what, exactly? And how?

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