When I was a boy, there were men, mainly quite old and apparently with nothing else to do, who walked up and down the prominent streets of towns and cities with sandwich boards announcing the imminent end of the world. They looked pretty pleased about it, too, as if they were in possession of a ...

My bank is large and I am small: Perhaps that is why it feels entitled to write to me so impertinently. I received a letter from it the other day with the heading “Some of your account information needs updating.” My account information does not need anything; it is not the kind of entity ...

The continued thoughtless use of the word person continues to puzzle me. Who was the Per whose son gave his name to every member of our species on the planet? Per is a well-known first name of Scandinavian men: Is it claimed, therefore, that we are all descended from a Scandinavian man? Is it not ...

Nearly three quarters of a century after his death, Hitler’s shadow continues to fall across Europe. Any dissent from any modern orthodoxy, no matter how silly, soon meets with the argumentum ad Hitlerum, to the effect that something or other is the beginning of the slippery slope to Auschwitz. ...

We live, as perhaps we always have lived, in curious times. On the one hand, we have never been as sensitive to what people say as we are today; we have no emotional skins, as it were, but only emotional raw nerve endings, so that the innocuous appears to us as corrosive as acid. On the other hand, ...

I don’t much care for Mr. Donald Trump as a person. He strikes me as vain, vulgar, blustering, boastful, shameless, and fundamentally uninteresting except as a specimen of one of the extremes of human character. I doubt that I would want to spend more than thirty minutes in his company. His ...

A few years before the genocide, I traveled through Rwanda. It struck me then as having been, by African standards, a very well-organized country. You had only to look over the border to the Congo, or Zaire as it was then called, to see the difference. On one side chaos and mess, on the other order ...

It was a beautiful day in Paris for a demonstration, brilliantly sunny and not too hot, and the crowds were out: obviously bourgeois, prosperous, well-behaved, and not at all multiracial or even multicultural. It was a march for the climate, as though the climate were an oppressed person wrongly ...

The case of Ariana Grande and the bishop who was a little too familiar with her reminded me of my adolescence. In those far-off days, when even vulgarity was more genteel than it is now, my companions and I learned how to turn even the most innocuous of statements into something salacious by the ...

Sitting in two airports last week, in Paris and Riga, it suddenly occurred to me that I had not seen a single person who was smartly, let alone elegantly, dressed (I do not exclude myself from this stricture; I have never been elegant in my life). Indeed, if there is one thing that unites mankind ...