In my personal library there are two books with the title Virus X. They both envisage the elimination of humanity, or a large part of it, by a newly emerged pathogen. One of them is by Frank Ryan, a physician and evolutionary biologist, and the other is by Sydney Horler, a British crime and ...

When I was still practicing as a doctor I believed, always mistakenly, that I had now heard every variety of human folly. However, even the dullest person can be highly original in the art of self-destruction, which is infinite in its variety of means: One can never plumb folly’s depths once and ...

I have noticed that, in all the acres of commentary (most of it respectful or even laudatory) on the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris with 25,000 square meters of polypropylene fabric, none has claimed that the beauty of the city has been thereby enhanced. It has been called ...

“Sometimes, doctor,” a patient of mine once said to me, “I feel like the little boy with his finger in the dyke, crying wolf.” That is a pretty good summary of how I feel most of the time. The fact is that there is much pleasure to be had in lamentation, or in being a voice in the ...

I went recently to a lecture about fintech, a subject of which I knew nothing (it is always tempting to go only to lectures on subjects that you already know about and that provide indisputable conformation of how well-informed you already were). I wasn’t even quite sure what fintech meant, and ...

There’s a pleasure in the downfall of sages, gurus, and moralists that is, unfortunately, part of the makeup of Man. Those whom we delight to place on a pedestal we delight equally to pull down. When a stern reader of lessons to humanity is found egregiously to have broken the very lessons that ...

If I were a Marxist, I might be tempted to say that the obligatory switch to electric cars is a conspiracy of the rich against the poor to enslave them yet further. (By the poor, I mean of course the relatively poor, not the absolutely destitute.) Many of the relatively poor have old, cheap, and ...

Nearly a century ago, in 1925 to be precise, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote an article for a Berlin newspaper titled “Making the World Uniform.” It began: Despite the pleasure that every voyage has given me these last years, a strong impression has stayed in my mind: a silent horror at ...

In times past, people used to preen themselves on being good Christians, but now they preen themselves on being good radicals or even good revolutionaries. Such preening is never attractive; it is the royal road to hypocrisy of the worst kind. On the back page of the French bourgeois intellectual ...

Skin, according to the song, is what keeps the insides in. It does far more than that, of course, and for many of us it is the most important organ of the body, if our willingness to spend money on it is the criterion by which attributed importance is to be judged. Even people who are not normally ...