Are criminals in real life ever even one-tenth as fascinating as they are in Christopher Nolan movies? Can you think of a real criminal as intriguing as the late Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight or Leonardo ...
Nothing is important or unimportant, but thinking makes it so. Nevertheless, other people's priorities infuriate us: We think them fools for worrying over trifles, while they disregard entirely what we think is of the ...
Last week, Canadian cops arrested more than 30 people operating a massive "international crime ring." A police spokesman carefully described those charged as “Roma,” but the Toronto Sun tabloid ...
This past Tuesday several people were murdered just outside the House of Commons. Killing people outside security barriers makes much better sense for a terrorist than trying to pass them, though the murderer did that too ...
Based on their entertainment value alone, I believe that the Phelps family of Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church deserves First Amendment protection. For entirely different reasons, the US Supreme Court agreed that these ...
Last night the streetlights in my pleasant little English market town were switched off at midnight. In fact they"ve been switching them off at midnight for two months, but I have not been here to notice it. However, ...
For a number of years I used to write a weekly column in the British Medical Journal about medicine and literature. The field, of course, was vast, inexhaustible, because medicine deals with birth and death and everything ...
During my recent period of quarantine in England, I was surrounded in my study by piles of books that I have always intended to read before I die. Even this modest ambition is unlikely to be fulfilled, however, given their ...
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a refugee from Islamic Somalia’s maltreatment of women, asks in her important book Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights why few feminists dare mention the ongoing diminishment of ...
NEW YORK—Nature is at her best right now, the leaves still holding, Central Park awash in golden browns and reds. I go there every morning, half a block away from my house, and under a giant elm I put the creaky body ...
“How can we not be united against death?” So wailed emotive carbuncle Keith Olbermann back in 2009. He was off on some typically nutty rant about single-payer health care, but still, it was a nicely turned ...
NEW YORK—It’s nice to finally be in the Bagel, a place where the cows have two legs and no bells around their necks. I walk daily around the park that lies two blocks away from my house and stick to the Upper East Side ...
It is a strange life, and none stranger than in the Gulf—the Persian Gulf, I mean, not that of Mexico, or even that of Carpentaria—where I have spent the past week. For obvious climatic reasons, it is an ...
GSTAAD—It snowed during the last two days of August up here, and why not? We’ve traded freedom of speech for “freedom from speech,” so on an upside-down planet, snow in the Alps in August is the new normal. The ...
Probably it's just my simpleminded arithmomania, but years ending in the numeral three seem to be more memorable than average, both publicly and personally, for reasons high or low. In 1953 the public became the personal. ...
AMARILLO, Tex."Out on the western edge of town, right before you hit the empty prairie that runs all the way to Albuquerque, there's a big, sprawling clothing store in the Cavender's chain where they have about five ...
Monday saw arguably the most asinine debate by British parliamentarians that has ever been held in Westminster Hall. The debate was triggered by an online petition having obtained 573,971 signatures in favor of banning ...
The Week’s Most Boring, Soaring, and Adoring Headlines CENSUS: NEARLY A QUARTER OF AMERICANS OVER AGE FIVE DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH AT HOME If you count the illegal aliens who come to our nation and gorge on our cake and ...
Trending online news topics often cough up amusingly odd juxtapositions, such as when “Auschwitz” was #2 behind “LeAnn Rimes” and right ahead of “Holiday Bread Recipes” on Yahoo!’s home page. Although I ...
There is no libertarian moment. Contrary to popular opinion, the self-styled "liberty movement" is not ushering in a new era of freedom. Friedrich Hayek's books aren"t flying off the shelf. Rand Paul's ...
The Week’s Most Appalling, Squalling, and Stonewalling Headlines TRIGGERED BY SHAKESPEARE England’s prestigious Cambridge University lost a little bit more of its luster by issuing a preemptive “trigger warning” to ...
In 2004 in rural Berkshire, England, a rush-hour commuter train from London to Plymouth collided with a stationary car at a level crossing and all eight carriages, bearing two hundred people, were derailed. Both the driver ...
I have no “guilty pleasures,” being long past caring what anyone thinks of my terminally middlebrow taste. No, I’ve outgrown Dali, don’t worry"although I won’t admit to just when"but ...
It's time for Morrissey's periodic turn as a subject of two minutes" hate. In a recent interview with news.com.au, the British singer provoked fury with his opposition to halal slaughter, a practice banned in several ...
