An item in a supposedly serious newspaper caught my attention recently. It reported a former Archbishop of Canterbury as saying that the British government systematically discriminated against Christians in its acceptance of Syrian refugees to settle in the country. It is not that I find this ...

A few years ago my wife and I planted some cherry trees on our land in France, and now they are in bloom. The strange thing is that I can stand and look at the blossom, if not for hours (one must not exaggerate), at least for several minutes at a time"€”and repeatedly. I enjoy watching the bees ...

The contempt in which we hold most of our politicians, while largely justified, is also dangerous. Politics seems increasingly to be the means by which people who would not otherwise succeed in business or any other sphere subsequently make fortunes and remain important for the rest of their lives. ...

The real winners of the recent Dutch elections were the animals"€”or at least the Party for the Animals, which might not benefit animals any more than workers"€™ parties benefit workers. We shall have to see. The animals, or their representatives, won five seats in the Dutch parliament. But ...

These are wonderful times for conspiracy theorists. Not a sparrow falls but M. Trump, Obama, or Putin is behind it, if not the CIA, the FBI, the FSB, MI6, or Mossad. The problem is that conspiracies do occur. I once had a patient who believed her mother was trying to poison her, and whose mother ...

The mode of transmission of the disease kuru was established by the American virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, who won the Nobel Prize for this work. Kuru was a fatal neurodegenerative disease found only among the Fore, a tribe in the highlands of New Guinea. It was their custom to eat the corpses ...

Foolishness springs eternal. And this is just as well for us journalists, because it gives us such easy targets when we have deadlines to meet and no time to think, which is most of the time. In fact, the targets are becoming easier and easier in the modern world. It is almost unfair, like mowing ...

In one of the Platonic dialogues, the Charmides, the subject is the nature of temperance. No final definition is arrived at, but that does not mean that the word has no meaning or that temperance therefore ceases to be a virtue. If we could talk only of what we could define, we should soon cease to ...

Self-love used to be a vice, but nowadays it is the nearest thing to a virtue, as a supposed precondition of our own mental health (whatever that might be). An Irish friend kindly forwarded me an article from The Irish Times reporting on a school in County Dublin that, on St. Valentine's Day, ...

My days of appearing in court as an expert witness in murder trials are over, but I am still interested in advocacy and am an admirer of advocates (contrary to a commonly expressed opinion of them). There are those who use the bludgeon and those who use the rapier; there are the bullies and the ...