January 2011
10 posts
"Out of a dream" Patti Smith on growing up,...
Last night Intelligence Squared welcomed the iconic Patti Smith to the Royal Geographical Society in London. Paying homage to the historic setting and explorers of years gone by, her interviewer Geoff Dyer noted that Patti herself was one of the greatest artistic explorers of the last 40 years; reaching into the unknown like Andy Warhol’s “pioneers without a frontier”. Patti brought these...
Argumentative kids - IQ2 at SOAS schools debating...
Last Saturday Intelligence Squared joined SOAS debating society in hosting their schools competition, in a university building somewhere near King’s Cross. IQ2 watched, impressed, as the hall filled with over 200 excited, smartly dressed debating enthusiasts, and novices - all schoolchildren between 13 and 16. What added to the charm and vibrance of this tournament was the range of...
Interviewing the interviewer - Geoff Dyer on...
As a prequel to our conversation with Patti Smith next Tuesday (January 25), Intelligence Squared’s Tony Curzon Price asked some questions to the man who’ll be interviewing Patti, cultural commentator Geoff Dyer. Discussion took as its starting point Dyer’s recent collection of essays Working the Room. These essays, which throw light on everything from DH Lawrence to life on the...
Tiger Mother comes to town
If someone were to ask me how I spent my youth I would have to give them the following answer: football, TV, girls. Everything else - especially homework - barely got a look in. And what did I learn? Well, I know hitting the cross bar from the half way line is no mean feat; that given half a chance Scrapheap Challenge is surprisingly watchable; and that it doesn’t really count if you say...
Good Prospects
Today we announced that Prospect, the elegant and brainy current affairs magazine, will be sponsoring our philosophy event, ‘John Gray and Adam Phillips in conversation on humankind’s quest for immortality’, on February 21 at the Notting Hill Tabernacle. We are thrilled to have their support on this metaphysical venture, and look forward to mixing chatter and wine with new revelations about...
Ars Poetica
A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit, Dumb As old medallions to the thumb, Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Of casement ledges where the moss has grown — A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs, Leaving, as the moon releases Twig by twig the night-entangled trees, Leaving, as the moon behind the winter...
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Live forever
Recent news about a magical age-defying enzyme ‘telomerase’ has teased out a new hope of immortality for humankind, a hope that should have been coffined with Lenin, or abandoned well before that – in the swoosh of the arrow that pierced Achilles’ heel.
Stephen Colbert, the host of satirical news programme The Colbert Report, had this to say about the scientific discoveries: ‘Finally a cure for...
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V.S. Naipaul comes to London this May: ‘You can't...
And so V.S. Naipaul has dedicated his life to meeting these moments. Born in Trinidad in 1932, he felt early on that the Caribbean would never really become home: ‘I wished to be a writer,’ he remarks, ‘but together with the wish there had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own’. So to the dreaming spires...
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Lenin, Darwin and other experiments in immortality...
On Monday 21st February at Cadogan Hall, John Gray and Adam Phillips will be discussing themes raised in Gray’s forthcoming book, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. The book recounts two separate and beguiling attempts by a group of Soviets, and a group of Edwardian intellectuals, to achieve eternal life through science. Appalled by the...
Two FREE science debates - get your tickets now
So, it’s January. Cold, rational, enlightened January. The time of the year that we laugh off all those yuletide falsehoods we were so blissfully drunk on in December. A boy born to die for all our sins? A virgin mother? Father Christmas? Pah! We all know that if it’s not in a science book its not worth knowing. Or isn’t it? Our free event, ‘Science will have all the answers’, at...