The Swedes are a coldhearted people. When a 15-year-old boy was gunned down in a busy square in Malmo recently, a photograph showed that the townspeople had placed only seventeen candles and seven bouquets of flowers on the site where he had fallen. If the murder had happened in Britain, the ground ...

We do not live in a golden age of the four cardinal virtues; perhaps there never was such an age, which is why life has always been such a mess. But we have gone further than our predecessors. I suspect that most of us would now be unable to name the virtues, let alone exercise them. Just to remind ...

About 25 years ago, I had a patient whose marriage broke up after an hour. Her groom had answered “Yes” to the following question, put to him according to the rites of the Church of England: “Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor, and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all ...

A woman in Indiana was recently found asphyxiated to death by a snake—a reticulated python—still wrapped round her neck. This was a death so horrible that you avert your mind from imagining it too closely. In England two years ago a young man was found strangled to death with his pet python ...

Once something is claimed as a right, it enters a different metaphysical plane from all other claims or considerations. It becomes untouchable, immune from derogation, exception, limitation, curtailment, or qualification. It can never be abrogated, for if it were ever to be abrogated it would not ...

Man is the only creature, as far as we know, that enjoys the contemplation of its own disappearance from the face of the earth. We find the prospect of our annihilation by disease, famine, war, asteroid, or climate change deeply satisfying. We feel, somehow, that we deserve it and that the world ...

Recently, it seems to me, there has been a concerted effort, amounting almost to a propaganda campaign, to persuade people that the brutalist strain in architecture was and is a glorious episode in architectural history. This campaign has the ring of guilty people who protest their innocence too ...

I remember well a burglar who was angry at his imprisonment. I was examining him medically shortly after his arrival in what locals called “the big house.” “I don’t need prison,” he said. “Prison’s no good to me.” “But it is to me,” I said mildly. “What do you mean?” he ...

It so happened that I was reading a book about gurus when I first heard of Adam Neumann. Not moving in the circles of billionaires, or alleged billionaires, and leading a very sheltered existence as far as I am able, I had not heard of him before. But as soon as I saw a picture of him in the wake ...

Just as love means never having to say you’re sorry, so being Pope means, I suppose, having to preach to, or perhaps at, the world. And Pope Francis certainly fulfills that part of his function. He recently turned his attention to the evils of adjectives and adverbs. He said that we have fallen ...