The world, said James Boswell, is not to be made a great hospital; but to a hammer everything is a nail, and to doctors and medical journals everything is either a medical problem or a medical solution. Looking at the website of the Journal of the American Medical Association today, I came across ...

The desire for perfection in human relations is a powerful stimulant of conflict—and of a bureaucracy to adjudicate it. That all should be fair, open, aboveboard, that no one should ever experience discomfort because of what someone else says, that each should be shown equal signs or marks of ...

One of the great pleasures of retirement is that one can lie abed in the morning and read Agatha Christie without any feeling of guilt—guilt about being late for work, for example. It doesn’t matter in the least if one gets up at eleven: One hasn’t anything else important, or ...

Nothing could better illustrate or be emblematic of the earnest suicidal frivolity of the West than the decision of the first female chief executive of the British insurance and pension company Aviva, which has assets of more than $420 billion under management, that the appointment to all senior ...

Perhaps I am more sensitive to them than I once was, but it seems to me that hectoring and badgering semi-political public messages (mostly paid for at public expense, of course) are much more prominent than they used to be. This is a West-wide phenomenon, originating from the United ...

There is a little Italian restaurant that we usually go to soon after our arrival in Paris, an unpretentious place where the pasta is good. It has a friendly atmosphere, and by now we are frequent enough customers to be greeted as friends. The patronne allows her children, aged about 7 and 9, when ...

The following sentence ought to be enough to send shivers down anyone’s spine, at least if it accurately reflects a reality: US attorneys plan to extract a multi-billion-dollar payment from crypto exchange Binance in exchange for discontinuing their criminal investigation of it. In other words, ...

The process of auto-beatification among the educated in the West seems more prevalent than ever. Possessed, as they believe, of knowledge, wisdom, and generosity, they believe also that they are the conscience of society who therefore ought rightly play a directing role in it. They have what Thomas ...

Recently, a Belgian politician did something unusual for a modern politician: He acted almost honorably. He was the Minister of Justice when two Swedish football supporters were shot dead in Brussels by a Tunisian Islamist, Abdelsalam Lassoued, age 45. Lassoued had been a common criminal in ...

The character of Sam Bankman-Fried continues to intrigue, not so much because it is remarkable in itself, but because he managed to inveigle so much money out of so many people who were supposedly sophisticated and hard-nosed. I suppose this is evidence that the desire to make a fast buck is among ...