Some years ago, I vowed to catalog my books and tidy up my study before I died to make things a little easier for my executors. Among other things, this entailed throwing out the piles of magazines from several years ago still in their unopened wrappers; but I was reluctant to do so without first ...

A British nurse called Miranda Hughes said in a television debate that people who voted Conservative didn’t deserve to be resuscitated in the National Health Service (NHS). There was an immediate outcry: How could any nurse say that people should not be resuscitated? Is it pedantic to point out ...

Censorship veers between the sinister and the farcical. Perhaps it reached its apogee of farce in the trial of Penguin Books in England in 1960, which had published Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959 and was tried the following year under the Obscene Publications Act. The prosecuting counsel, Mervyn ...

Earlier this week, I received two articles by email, one from the American right and one from the American left, each alleging that the other side wanted to subvert, or even abandon, the American Constitution. The left alleged that the ruling by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade was but ...

A government of the people, in Lincoln’s phrase, has changed by degrees into a people of the government. When one considers the number of duties or obligations one must fulfill to the government, it is clear who is boss in the relationship—and it is not we, the people. Naturally, the ...

Everyone is agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic drove people mad, but there is disagreement over who the madmen were, itself another cause of ferocious argument: a kind of meta-madness, as it were. I am still not clear in my mind what I would or should have done if I had been in charge (would have ...

A respected journalist and writer of my acquaintance, now retired, always had an interesting, unusual, and unexpected perspective on matters that usually divided people into two opposing and irreconcilable camps. He said things that were both obvious (once they had been enunciated) and revelatory. ...

One of the most remarkable developments of recent years has been the legalization—dare I say, the institutionalization?—of corruption. This is not a matter of money passing under the table, or of bribery, though this no doubt goes on as it always has. It is far, far worse than that. Where ...

Yesterday I received a letter from England that bore the postmark “Dog Awareness Week.” It came with a printed paw-mark. Of course, for me every week is Dog Awareness Week. I never go a week without awareness of dogs. Not only is dog man’s best friend, he is man’s only friend. When I walk ...

“As flies to wanton boys,” says Gloucester in King Lear after his eyes have been put out by the Duke of Cornwall at the behest of the evil Goneril, “are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport.” This could be updated to the following: As flies to Damien Hirst are we to the gods: he ...