A Service Economy Without Service

Recently, I had the doubtful pleasure of flying aboard British Airways back to London. No doubt the airline is safe, its pilots well-trained and its maintenance staff competent; ...

Triggered

With an election coming up, various well-known Democrats haven’t been able to keep themselves from arguing with me on Twitter about crime statistics, which tends to be an ...

Kanye West

The Jews Are Ye’s Misfortune

Kanye West’s Jew-obsessed meltdown offers many potential angles for analysis. I could start with the “why do you still trust Tucker?” angle. Carlson prefaced his ...

Barenaked Ladies

Stanley b/w Rogers

Ali G: [Explaining his business idea] What is the most popular thing in the world? Donald Trump: [Ponders the question, then decisively finds the right answer] Music. G: [After a ...

Nursing a Grudge

A British nurse called Miranda Hughes said in a television debate that people who voted Conservative didn’t deserve to be resuscitated in the National Health Service (NHS). ...

The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries

The Dynamics of Repute

The rise and fall of fame—or at least of the number of times books mention the name of an artist or other historical figure—can be conveniently graphed using Google’s free ...

In Google’s Bad Books

Censorship veers between the sinister and the farcical. Perhaps it reached its apogee of farce in the trial of Penguin Books in England in 1960, which had published Lady ...

Singapore

A Little Learning

At least since the 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, social scientists have been publishing rankings of countries by average cognitive test ...

An Epidemic of Ideology

Earlier this week, I received two articles by email, one from the American right and one from the American left, each alleging that the other side wanted to subvert, or even ...

One-Way Ticket

A government of the people, in Lincoln’s phrase, has changed by degrees into a people of the government. When one considers the number of duties or obligations one must fulfill ...

Plan Biden From Outer Space

In the words of John Goodman from Barton Fink, “Jesus, it’s hot.” L.A.’s historic, unprecedented September heat wave is literally murdering me. But you wanna know ...

Portrait of Princess Elizabeth, 1933.

The Royal One

The last words of Queen Elizabeth are reputed to have been, “All my possessions for a moment of time.” That was Queen Elizabeth I, however, in 1603 and not the current United ...

The Power of Paranoia

Everyone is agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic drove people mad, but there is disagreement over who the madmen were, itself another cause of ferocious argument: a kind of ...

Mississippi State Capitol

Mississippi Shrinking

Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, didn’t have running water last week. Fortunately, water pressure has now been restored, but the unhappy residents are still being instructed ...

War Diary

Eighty-two years ago, when Mussolini attacked Greece, the people—deeply offended—simply fought back. Their response followed Plato’s definition of a situation whereby the ...

Job Snobs

A respected journalist and writer of my acquaintance, now retired, always had an interesting, unusual, and unexpected perspective on matters that usually divided people into two ...


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