My late friend, the distinguished economist Peter Bauer, used to say that the only true unemployment in the modern world was among satirists, for the world had grown so ridiculous that what was intended as satire was either a description of what already existed or a prophecy of what would soon come ...

Chile is one of many faraway countries of which I know nothing, but I was intrigued to read in the French press of its recent presidential election. Socialist candidate Michelle Bachelet won by a large majority of the votes cast: 62.16% against 37.83% for her opponent. I presume that the remaining ...

The unctuous pseudo-grief in the West after Nelson Mandela's death at the good age of 95 was to me nauseating in the extreme; it was so overdone that, though I am no Freudian, it raised suspicions in my mind of reaction formation, the psychological defense mechanism against unwanted thoughts ...

I think I suffer from the only behavioral disorder that does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. This is rather odd because the disorder has been known for at least two centuries, ever since the Reverend Thomas Dibdin published his great work ...

I suppose everyone has his madeleine moment"€”that experience, sensory or otherwise, that awakens in him a long train of memories. Actually, the longer one lives the more madeleine moments there are. The other day, for example, I had one while reading the newspaper.  The story was about an ...

Every night and every morn Some to misery are born, Every morn and every night Some are born to sweet delight. The first couplet of Blake's verse seems to me a good deal more certain than the second because happiness and misery, while opposite, are not in the least symmetrical. I count myself to ...

Reading recently a monograph about the lives of heroin addicts in preparation for an article about addiction I had been commissioned to write, I came across a couple of comparatively new locutions that irritate me: sex work and sex worker. What is meant by these, of course, is prostitution and ...

Yesterday morning, as I was sitting in the flat on Paris that I have rented for a time quietly finishing my latest book, Murderers I Have Known (and I have known quite a few), a furious row broke out in the street six floors below. I went out onto the terrace"€”the flat is on the building's top ...

Most people read to confirm their prejudices rather than to learn something new or change their minds. Moreover, they recall what confirms their opinions much better than they remember what contradicts them. So aware was Charles Darwin of this human tendency that, at least according to his ...

There is one group of people whom it is morally permissible to hate, and of whom in these times of speech codes it is allowed or even obligatory to speak hatefully: namely, the rich. This is rather odd when one thinks of it, for economic resentment was ultimately responsible for more deaths in the ...