I hold no brief for the tobacco companies and have no shares in them. I detest the habit, perhaps because my father smoked an evil pipe whose product had been well described by ...

I almost never bother to try to forecast the outcome of an election. After all, we shall all know soon enough. High-tech California, for instance, should be done counting its ...

Remember Charles Rothenberg? Hopefully not, as it’s a most unpleasant memory. In the early 1980s, Rothenberg was locked in a bitter custody dispute with his wife, Marie, over ...

At last! The benefits of diversity have finally arrived in my hometown! Recently, the front-page regional news story was all about a big black man named Mohammad Alhadi who had ...

No one, I imagine, would include a speech by Donald Trump in an anthology of succinctness or political eloquence. Whether he is too lazy to organize his thoughts, or simply ...

What does it take for a parent to get arrested? Surprisingly little. Scott and Heather Wallace of Hewitt, Texas, encourage their three boys to play outside on their own to build ...

We know the Cambridge Union just held a shameful, ugly debate on making all vaccinations mandatory, because someone had the foresight to film it and put it on YouTube. When you ...

I'm not sure the Central Park Five really want a civil trial on what happened the night of April 19, 1989, but by suing Donald Trump for defamation, that's what they're going to ...

Has 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola pulled off the artistic comeback of the century by liquidating half of his heirs’ expected inheritance in his wine business to film ...

Sometimes it really is cruel to be kind, as the old adage almost goes. If so, then our current Western #BeKind culture must be amongst the very cruelest societies ever to have ...

Whenever I hear the word equity, my heart sinks, though I won’t go as far as to say that I reach for my Browning. My irritation on hearing the word is recent, however: I don’t ...

“Does anyone else look like me in Alcoholics Anonymous?” says the headline on AA’s latest promotional leaflet, above a picture of four smiling cartoon faces, two of them ...

As my basement human-sacrifice room has been looking a little dingy of late and putting off the rest of the coven, I was recently in need of the services of some professional ...

Recently, I read a splendid book, titled Homo cretinus, by the French science journalist and writer Olivier Postel-Vinay, on the subject of human stupidity, a subject as ...

When I was a small child, there were two little twin retard girls who used to entertain all the other kids on the housing estate by getting down on all fours and lapping up dog ...

Some years ago, I asked the owner of the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, the only specialist secondhand poetry store in Britain, whether he had any books by poets with one leg. He ...