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 ...
The British Medical Association, of which I am an undistinguished member, recently published a booklet entitled A Guide to Effective Communication in the Workplace, which I strongly suspected would be as helpful as a booklet entitled Improving Athletic Performance by Cutting the Achilles Tendon. I ...
On 30 March, 1933, the great German recorder of daily life under the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer, noticed a balloon in a toy shop inscribed with a swastika. In my newspaper on 14 January, 2017, I noticed a photograph of a girl aged 8 years old (I should estimate) holding up a banner at the ...
The claim by Oxfam, the charity that so loves the poor that it is safe to predict that it will never abolish itself no matter how rich humanity becomes, that the eight richest men in the world own as much as the poorer half of the whole of humanity combined, is at first sight extremely startling. ...
