Andrew Brown | |
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Born | 1955 (age 67–68) London, England |
Occupation |
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Language | English |
Notable works | Fishing in Utopia |
Notable awards | Orwell Prize |
Website | |
thewormbook |
Andrew Brown (born 1955 in London) is an English journalist, writer, and editor. [1] He was one of the founding staff members of The Independent , where he worked as a religious correspondent, parliamentary sketch writer, and a feature writer. [2] He has written extensively on technology for Prospect and the New Statesman and been a feature writer on The Guardian . [3] He has worked as the editor for the Belief section of The Guardian's Comment is Free, which won a Webby under his leadership, [4] and is currently a leader writer and member of the paper's editorial board. He is also the press columnist of the Church Times . [5] In The Beginning was the Worm (2004) was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize. Fishing in Utopia (2008) won the Orwell Prize and was nominated for the Dolman Best Travel Book Award in 2009.
Brown is the son of Bletchley Park codebreaker Patricia Bartley. [6]
Brown has described himself as someone for whom "Christianity is only true backwards." [7] He has written that he is "constantly astonished by the way in which the Church of England contains such a large number of clever, learned and dedicated people giving their lives to an institution that is none of those things." He has also concluded, "But I still can't do it myself. So why worry? Why not see it all as nonsense? Because really it isn't all nonsense. As a friend of mine, a former missionary, said once: 'It's about the thing that is true even if Christianity isn't true. Christian language does things that no other use of language can. I can conclude only that God has called me to be an atheist.'" [7] [8]
Brown has criticised Richard Dawkins for what he calls the cult of personality that has grown around him and his positions. [9] He is also sceptical of the scientific concept of memes, as developed by Dawkins. [10] [11]
In September 2019, Private Eye magazine named Brown as the author of an editorial in The Guardian newspaper about former British prime minister David Cameron. This touched on the death of Cameron's six-year-old son. Brown claimed the PM only ever felt "privileged pain". The article provoked outrage across the political spectrum, and the paper later said the piece "fell far short of our standards. It has now been amended, and we apologise completely."
Brown has been a fierce critic of the Sam Harris' position on torture. He has attacked Harris for what he has described as Harris' advocacy of torture in situations where we are willing to accept collateral damage (i.e., from bombing, etc.), as it relates to fighting the war on terror. [12]
Brown fears English Wikipedia has outcompeted rival encyclopedias and problems that lead to criticism of Wikipedia will continue. Brown fears "charlatans and liars" have the most to gain from editing Wikipedia, and potential idealistic contributors are discouraged, due to difficulties editing the site, especially through smartphones. [13]
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
Memetics is a study of information and culture. While memetics originated as an analogy with Darwinian evolution, digital communication, media, and sociology scholars have also adopted the term "memetics" to describe an established empirical study and theory described as Internet Memetics. Proponents of memetics, as evolutionary culture, describe it as an approach of cultural information transfer. Those arguing for the Darwinian theoretical account tend to begin from theoretical arguments of existing evolutionary models. Those arguing for Internet Memetics, by contrast, tend to avoid reduction to Darwinian evolutionary accounts. Instead some of these suggest distinct evolutionary approaches. Memetics describes how ideas or cultural information can propagate, but doesn't necessarily imply a meme's concept is factual.
Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. His 1976 book The Selfish Gene popularised the gene-centred view of evolution. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards.
David Stephen Mitchell is an English novelist, television writer, and screenwriter.
Rana Dasgupta is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He grew up in Cambridge, England, and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2010 The Daily Telegraph called him one of Britain's best novelists under 40. In 2014 Le Monde named him one of 70 people who are making the world of tomorrow. Among the prizes won by Dasgupta's works are the Commonwealth Prize and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award.
Andrew O'Hagan is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author. Three of his novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize and he has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and Islam in particular, and is known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
The Orwell Prize, based at University College London, is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity governed by a board of trustees. Four prizes are awarded each year: one each for a fiction and non-fiction book on politics, one for journalism and one for "Exposing Britain's Social Evils" ; between 2009 and 2012, a fifth prize was awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to "make political writing into an art".
The God Delusion is a 2006 book by British evolutionary biologist, ethologist Richard Dawkins, a professorial fellow at New College, Oxford and, at the time of publication, the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.
Edward Docx is a British writer. His first novel, The Calligrapher, was published in 2003. He is an associate editor of New Statesman Magazine.
Jason Cowley is an English journalist, magazine editor and writer. After working at the New Statesman, he became the editor of Granta in September 2007, while also remaining a writer on The Observer. He returned to the New Statesman as its editor in September 2008.
Johann Eduard Hari is a British-Swiss writer and journalist who has written for The Independent and The Huffington Post. In 2011, Hari was suspended from The Independent and later resigned, after admitting to plagiarism and fabrications dating back to 2001, and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct. He has since written books on the topics of depression, the war on drugs, and the effect of technology on attention spans.
Tim Butcher is an English author, broadcaster and journalist. He is the author of Blood River (2007), Chasing the Devil (2010) and The Trigger (2014), travel books blending contemporary adventure with history.
Charlotte Higgins, is a British writer and journalist.
The term New Atheism was coined by the American journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 to describe the positions of some atheist academics, writers, scientists, and philosophers of the 21st century.
Francis Spufford FRSL is an English author and teacher of writing whose career has seen him shift gradually from non-fiction to fiction. His first novel Golden Hill received critical acclaim and numerous prizes including the Costa Book Award for a first novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is a book by science history writer James Gleick, published in March 2011, which covers the genesis of the current information age. It was on The New York Times best-seller list for three weeks following its debut.
Russell Barnes is a British television producer and director, known primarily for documentaries about science and contemporary history. He was educated at Bedford Modern School and studied history at Christ's College, Cambridge.
Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written three full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature.
About 8,000 women worked in Bletchley Park, the central site for British cryptanalysts during World War II. Women constituted roughly 75% of the workforce there. While women were overwhelmingly under-represented in high-level work, such as cryptanalysis, they were employed in large numbers in other important work, such as operating cryptographic machinery and communications machinery; translating of Axis documents; traffic analysis; clerical duties, and many more besides. Women made up the majority of Bletchley Park’s workforce, most enlisted in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS, nicknamed the Wrens.