Books that are good: Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio

  My favourite thing about the Penguin Classics series is that they can introduce you to books that are genuine classics of world literature that you would otherwise never have heard of. Alongside their editions of Dickens, Dostoevsky and Flaubert are things like the stories of Japanese Modernist Ryunoske Akutagawa, the ancient Indian collection of fables …

Ancient Indian spaceships and black Egyptians: how not to destroy colonialism

I recently wrote about the ‘ancient astronaut’ hypothesis. This post is a sort of follow-up to that looking at how other types of pseudohistory also (maybe inadvertently) reinforce the very ideological points they claim to be arguing against – in this case, colonialism. (This post came out a lot longer than I'd thought, so consider …

Things can only get better: ancient astronauts and progress

One of the more popular ‘paranormal conspiracy theories’ – if we can call it that – is the ‘ancient astronauts’ idea. This is the suggestion that aliens visited Earth at some point in the past, and affected human society in some major way. The 'evidence' put forward most frequently for this is the idea that …

Podcasts that are good: Elegy for The Parapod

So. Farewell, then, The Parapod, which has bowed out after three series and a couple of specials. If you haven’t heard The Parapod yet, go and download it all. As in, now. Stop reading this and go do it (but then come back to read this). Done it yet? What did I just tell you? …

The coelocanth-like discovery shocking America

In what is already being called ‘the discovery of the century,’ white experts have been shocked to discover living examples of Racism in the USA. “It’s astonishing to have actual proof that Racism still exists,” said one commentator. “Unless I saw it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it.” Once widespread across the …