No Love Lost

Some people keep reading matter in their lavatories, though whether for their own benefit or that of their visitors I have never been able to determine—nor have I ever asked. I suppose that it comes in handy if you’re constipated, though this is a problem from which, as yet, I have never suffered. On second thought, I daresay the constipated are otherwise too preoccupied to bother themselves with literature. There is probably scientific research to be done on the relation between reading matter found in lavatories and the nature of the household in which it is found, because there is ...

What’s the New Current Thing?

I’m not much in the business of making predictions about the future, because it’s hard enough to understand what’s happening in the present. I don’t forecast the next big ...

Sigmund Freud

Freud the Fraud

This festive break’s big Christmas and New Year U.S. movie release, Freud’s Last Session, stars Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud, telling the story of the “great” ...

Brown Shirts ’n’ Skins

Last week a clip from something called “Timcast” went viral. Some round-faced, beady-eyed stoner (I think that’s “Tim”) was debating a manic Robert Downey Jr. look-alike ...

Harry, Duke of Sussex

Abnormality: The New Normal

In his recent livestreamed interview with Hungarian-Canadian “toxic trauma therapist” Dr. Gabor Maté, besides crediting the ingestion of the hallucinogen ayahuasca with ...

Fred and Adele Astaire

My Lesbian Dance Theory

During the dog days of August, there was a brief flurry of partisan excitement when Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert denounced the White House’s student loan giveaway as, ...

Damien Hirst

The Broken Publicity Machine

“As flies to wanton boys,” says Gloucester in King Lear after his eyes have been put out by the Duke of Cornwall at the behest of the evil Goneril, “are we to the gods: they ...

Waste of Ink

There are no sheep more ovine than those who get themselves tattooed in order to individuate themselves. Judging by the statistics, such sheeplike behavior is becoming more and ...

The Fallacy of the Real Me

According to a Gallup poll, the percentage of the American population that now “identifies” as LGBTQ+ has doubled by comparison with ten years ago, and now stands at 7.1 ...

Fit to Be Fat

A curious example of the power of social trends on thought is that two years into the Covid pandemic, nobody of any influence has yet bothered to launch a campaign to persuade ...

Norman Mailer

Be Your Own Advert

To mark the centenary of the birth of Norman Mailer—which I shall not be celebrating wildly—a publisher decided to reissue a volume of his essays. An employee of the ...

Ventura, CA

Isle of L.A. Part I: The Changing Colors of the Landscape

In honor of my upcoming 53rd birthday, I’m launching a two-part (or three...haven’t decided yet) series on the changing face of my native city. I’ve never understood why ...

If It’s All the Same to You…

Nearly a century ago, in 1925 to be precise, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote an article for a Berlin newspaper titled “Making the World Uniform.” It began: Despite the ...

The Pain Principle

There is a lot of misery in the world, it would be useless to deny it. The description of the world as a vale of tears surely conveys something to every one of us. And yet, all ...


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