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FiveBooks Interviews
The historian takes us from St Augustine to Milan Kundera in an attempt to pin down a fleeting spark of eternity in the present. He chooses five books on time as a philosophical concept and our tenuous understanding of the same.
The Professor of Communication and Culture says music is a technology of the self, a set of tools and techniques which we use to work out harder at the gym or set the tone for a date. ‘I think anyone can relate to that. Can anyone bear listening to Phil Collins while they’re trying to pump some iron at the gym?’ he asks. He chooses five books on what music means.
The author of Torture and Democracy gives a harrowing interview on the effects of violence, torture and trauma on the human being. He says many army torturers can’t confess for fear of losing their pensions, and if they don’t confess they can’t get help. Torture, he says, is a slippery slope.
The author of The Happiness Hypothesis says there is an eternal battle between the Apollonian spirit of order and the Dionysian spirit of revelry and collective ecstasy. Even though Apollo has the upper hand in the West, you can’t stamp Dionysus out completely.
The bestselling author defines the existential origin of evil as the refusal to acknowledge and confront our own mortality. The murderer, he says, is the person who tries to avoid the inevitability of his own death by taking the power of life into his hands. He chooses five books that give a secular definition of evil, always intertwined with love.
The head of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University says the quality of your attachment to your parents can predict not just short-term outcomes, like how well you do at school and your social popularity, but also long-term outcomes like your risk of divorce and your risk of developing personality disorders in adulthood.
The Professor of Culture says celebrity is all about displaying status. Charisma attaches itself not just to individuals but to people with a particular social position. A duchess must never be more than 100 yards from her carriage because you need a carriage in order to qualify as a duchess! Great monarchs of former history established their rule by being intensely visible in a series of processions and displays. He chooses five books on celebrity.
The quantum information theory professor says there is nothing distinctly novel that was brought to philosophy by quantum mechanics. The key tenet is this randomness that is at the core of our interaction with the world: there is an element that you can never make more deterministic. And, of course, randomness as a way of looking at the world has existed for a long time. He chooses books on quantifying the universe.
The renowned expert in planetary atmospheric evolution at Penn State University is actively involved in the search by NASA for habitable planets outside our solar system. He says before you start looking for intelligent life you should try to figure out if life itself is common and, despite what the pessimists say, he thinks that it could be – with the right tools to find it.
Anne C Heller is a magazine editor and journalist. She has been the managing editor of The Antioch Review, fiction editor of Esquire and Redbook, the features editor of Lear’s, and the executive editor of the magazine development group at Condé Nast Publications, with a special emphasis on money and finance. In her biography of libertarian Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, she documents the life of one of capitalism’s most fervent defenders. She blogs on libertarianism and associated issues at www.annecheller.com