There is, apparently, a saying in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the effect that anyone who says that he understands the Lebanon does not understand the Lebanon. I am not sure that this saying does not apply to most countries, possibly even to Liechtenstein. Nevertheless, human beings ...

Were it not for the fact that I have been losing things from the time I possessed anything to lose, I should have taken my inability to find my credit card recently as a sign of incipient cognitive decline. I panicked—not at the thought of someone using the card to treat himself at my expense, ...

Stanford University has published, to much-deserved derision, a kind of index of prohibited words, that is to say words that could possibly cause anyone, even animals, distress. Of course, if you treat people as eggshells, eggshells is what they will become, especially if they derive some kind of ...

For all of us who scribble for publication, at however low a level, all activities other than writing take on at most a secondary importance. Even meals, necessary as they no doubt are, can come to seem unwanted interruptions of the real business of life, which is writing. We are apt to forget that ...

“There is nothing either good or bad,” said Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I suppose the same could be said of importance: “There is nothing either important or unimportant, but thinking makes it so.” The main difference is in the number of syllables. Of course, our assessment of ...

It is nearly Christmas—or what Google, with its acute sensitivity toward Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Druze, pagans, animists, atheists, agnostics, and others, calls the holiday season—and so, contrary to my natural disposition, I should try to write something heartwarming and cheerful. ...

One of the most astonishing things about the woke is their high boredom threshold. They seem to have the same thoughts about the same subjects, expressed in the same language, all their waking lives. They never tire or let their vigilance down. They look at Raphael or Botticelli and see only social ...

Financial collapses are interesting and sometimes hilarious for those who observe them, but painful for those who suffer them. In addition to the economic discomfort or hardship they cause is the humiliation of having been fool enough to invest in what turns out to have been a giant and obvious ...

Thank God I don’t understand cryptocurrency, otherwise I should have lost all my money ages ago, and probably my house into the bargain. I do know one or two people who made a lot of money from Bitcoin in the early days, but as to whether they managed to hang on to it, I do not know. To have lost ...

One evening a couple of weeks ago, I happened with my wife to be walking past the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster, in London, while there was a small but noisy demonstration going on. We were on our way to a dinner party nearby. The demonstrators, many of whom were masked, were shouting, ...