Traveling between England and France recently was a profoundly depressing experience. First I had to get to Euston Station and then walk the few hundred yards to St. Pancras Station. The Euston Road, which runs between them, is not a beautiful thoroughfare at the best of times, and this was ...

I would like to think that nothing human is alien to me (as the Roman playwright and former slave Terence put it), but it is not quite true. I draw the line, for example, at rap music, which always puts me in mind of experiments I witnessed during physiology classes fifty years ago, in which ...

When I read that the United Arab Emirate’s Minister of Tolerance had been accused of sexual assault, I could not help but smile. The account of the assault itself, if true, was not at all funny, quite the reverse, but what caused me to smile was the very idea of a government minister of ...

Everyone knows what to do about the COVID epidemic—except, of course, those who happen to be in charge. They are floundering like a fish newly landed on the deck of a boat. But if you go down to your local bar or pub, you will learn exactly what ought to be done, and people who a few short—or ...

President Trump was ill with COVID-19; President Trump was treated with certain new and expensive drugs; therefore President Trump was cured by his treatment with those new and expensive drugs, and demand for them will therefore rise. Why should presidents get all the best treatment? Such is ...

As every journalist and lawyer knows, it takes about half an hour to become an expert on any subject. In the days when I wrote for some of the less cerebral but well-paying publications of the British press, my protestations that I knew nothing whatever of the subject on which they wanted me to ...

During my recent period of quarantine in England, I was surrounded in my study by piles of books that I have always intended to read before I die. Even this modest ambition is unlikely to be fulfilled, however, given their number, my life expectancy, and the rate at which I read them. It would ...

It is difficult enough for people to say what they mean, but it is even more difficult, at least for some of them, to mean what they say. Moreover, some people neither say what they mean nor mean what they say, but mean something else entirely by their utterances that has almost no connection with ...

My understanding of economics must be deficient, or else my personal experience of the world is misleading. Both are possible, of course: None of us can experience more than an infinitesimal part of all that the world contains, and since even the best economists often have a poor grasp of reality, ...

Sometimes, like little Greta Thunberg, I long for the days when people had fewer possessions and cared for those few that they had. For example, they would have only a small number of pairs of socks and therefore would not have been able to let them accumulate to be washed all at once in a ...