Why David Brooks’ The Second Mountain missed the mark
The first two chapters of David Brooks’ The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (2019) were great. The rest had too much of an out-of-touch worldview to gain …
Review of How Minds Change by David McRaney
David McRaney’s book How Minds Change: The New Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion (2022) offers a view of change that is both hopeful and frustrating. On the one hand, …
Review of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
David Graeber never fails to radically reshape my view of the world with his research-informed writing and investigations into things many of us have taken for granted so long we …
Generative AI and New Zealand
The Generative AI panel discussion held at academyEX on the evening of August 3, 2023 offered a range of perspectives on emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology and what it means …
Review of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist who challenges almost everything we think we know about the concept of emotions in her book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret …
New Critical Companion Book on Dune
I’m pleased to write that my next book on Dune has been published by Palgrave, titled Frank Herbert’s Dune: A Critical Companion. It is part of the series Palgrave Science …
Notes from Women’s Studies Association NZ Conference 2016
The following are my notes from the sessions I attended at the Women’s Studies Association (NZ) Pae Akoranga Wāhine Conference on September 1-2, 2016, at the University of Auckland, New …
The Future of the Humanities by Visiting Professor Alan Liu
In this presentation on November 5, 2015, entitled “The Future of the Humanities”, Professor Alan Liu focused on the larger conversation in the public realm around the so-called crisis in …
Azar Nafisi and The Power of Literature at the Sydney Opera House
I am glad I discovered that Azar Nafisi would be speaking at the Sydney Opera House during my time in Sydney before I bought tickets to the opera Turandot (although …