Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, and many authors ought to be flattered to be plagiarized, considering what rubbish they write. Such, at any rate, were my first thoughts on reading the allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Natalie J. Perry, brought against her by Christopher Rufo, the ...

My memory is good in almost exact proportion to the uselessness of the information I call upon it to memorize. Why this should be, I do not know; perhaps it is an unconscious rejection of utilitarianism as a guiding principle of life. In like fashion, I have spent a considerable proportion of my ...

I have never really understood why people like pug dogs. They seem to me ugly, they run to fat, and because of their pushed-in snouts and widely spaced eyes, they are inexpressive. They have difficulty breathing, like a fat man trying to sleep on his back. Between breathing and choking, there is ...

Several of my American friends expressed to me their outrage at the recent trial of Donald Trump, his sons and associates, in New York for civil fraud, resulting in a huge and possibly ruinous fine; so I decided to read in full Judge Arthur F. Engoron’s decision in the case. Let me first lay ...

Sometimes I wonder whether the true aim of modern “progressives”—progress toward what, one is tempted to ask—is to provoke such a strong and even violent reaction among conservatives and old-fashioned liberals that it would retrospectively justify their division of humanity into the woke, ...

A correspondent who knows precisely the type of things that I habitually complain about (and without such complaint I would have nothing to say) kindly drew my attention to the proposed Obama Center in Chicago. The Center is completely mad, the madness in question being an attack of megalomania ...

On the whole, the cinematic world has dealt less severely with Communism than it has dealt with Nazism. The reason for this is at least twofold. The first is that many in the cinematic world were sympathetic to Communism, at least in the abstract—which is to say, they might want it for others, ...

Last week, I gave a talk to my local historical society about a distinguished lady who lived locally and died sixty years ago this year. After my talk, a middle-aged gentleman—by far the youngest in the audience—came up to me and said something very revealing, which, of course, I shall leave to ...

The current preliminaries to the forthcoming American election are both appalling and fascinating (the appalling usually fascinates in a way that the meritorious seldom does). The contest seems to be boiling down to which of the two candidates’ mental gaffes is the more disqualifying for the ...

Viscerally, I am in favor of the death penalty, but in more sober reality I am against it. There are some crimes so heinous, so beyond all extenuation, that death seems the only just punishment; but justice is not the only desideratum in human arrangements, so this is not a decisive argument. I ...