As is well-known by the naive, science is the disinterested search for truth about the empirical world. Vanity, greed, pride, rivalry, enmity, thirst for fame and other human passions do not enter into it. A scientist is delighted if his colleague discovers something important that he has ...

I rarely feel sorry for professional politicians, especially powerful ones; after all, they have chosen their career and (especially in modern conditions) have generally pursued power to the exclusion of all other possible goals, which is not admirable. As often as not, they have not much cultural ...

Compared with the slum dwellers of São Paulo who erect their own shacks in a day or two, the average French (or British) architect is a complete aesthetic illiterate and incompetent, or perhaps moron would be a better word for it. Aesthetically, if not hygienically, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro ...

Interviewed recently about COVID-19, a subject on which I am now, like only 1,500,000,000 others in the world, an expert, I was asked as a last question whether I thought that any good would come of it. I am afraid I was not quick enough (I am getting on in age) to answer, “The end of mass ...

Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, said David Hume, but by adding “ought to be,” I think he spoiled his argument, which was that, in the last analysis, moral judgment is not a matter of rationality. After all, what cannot be otherwise than it is, is not a proper subject of ...

I will say this for the coronavirus, that it has caused the prices of hotel rooms in London to fall precipitously. Normally when I stay there, I have to put up in semi-sleazy hotels in degentrified quarters of the city, but recently I was able, thanks to the coronavirus, to stay somewhere more ...

Someone—having reached the age of forgetfulness, I forget who—said to me a few weeks ago that the first sign of socialism is a shortage of toilet paper. This humble commodity then becomes a matter of political privilege, accessible only to those with some kind of favorable connection to ...

I have long thought that if it were not for complaint, we should have very little to talk about. Complaint is like crime in the theories of the first real sociologist, Émile Durkheim: It is the glue of society. Without opposition to crime, society would fall apart. Without complaint, most of us ...

If racists are those who obsessively see human life through the lens of race, there are few more racist organizations than the Arts Council of England. According to the Guardian newspaper, itself thoroughly racist according to the above definition, the Arts Council is threatening to cut off ...

Is changing one’s mind a sign of strength or of weakness? It depends on the circumstances. There are people who are at the mercy of the last person who spoke or who can be turned like a pancake by the feeblest sophist argument. There are others who are so attached to their own views that they ...