I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it talks; I wish I liked the way it walks... —Sir Walter Raleigh (1861–1922) During the ...

Back in 2000, Vladimir Putin repeatedly petitioned for Russia to be admitted to NATO, according to George Robertson, former defense minister of Britain, and my friend Oliver ...

“It is a beautiful spring day,” wrote my grandfather to my mother, “and the sun is shining brightly, but there is no sun bright enough to penetrate the dark clouds that ...

Never has the contrast between the scale of world events and my own little personal concerns been so great. While millions flee bombardment, and the world economy ...

It is not often that the title of an article in the Guardian newspaper makes me laugh because of its absurdity, but I laughed when I read the ...

I love a good cemetery, and cemeteries do not come much better than the one in Highgate in London, which I visited recently while staying nearby. It is romantically ...

It’s foolish to speculate about the future course of a war, but three weeks into Mr. Putin’s War, it’s evident that Russia’s Plan A laid an egg. Apparently, Plan A was, ...

For the last few nights, before I go to sleep and when I wake up, I have watched the flies on the ceiling of my bedroom. There are about six or seven of them; there used to be far ...

Three years ago I wrote about a girl I dated in the 1990s who slowly but inexorably fell to paranoid schizophrenia. The hardest part of the end-stage of that relationship was ...

What is it to grow old, asked Matthew Arnold as the first line of his poem “Growing Old,” which he published in 1867 when he himself was 45, a greater age then than now, ...

People, it seems, are increasingly unable to bear the presence in a room of someone who is of different political opinion from theirs. We have now become adept at gauging the ...

Meet Chicago Democrat Party official (and amateur musician) Mary Lemanski. On the evening of Nov. 21, following the mass murders at the Waukesha Christmas parade, as the bodies of ...

Over the years I’ve devoted a lot of text in this column to the “perpetrators” of America’s decline. The “intellectuals,” the billionaire donors, the think-tankers. ...

I went recently to a lecture about fintech, a subject of which I knew nothing (it is always tempting to go only to lectures on subjects that you already know about and that ...

It’s an incident that’s gone unreported outside the tightly knit community of science nerds and “skeptics.” Now, when I use the word “skeptics,” I’m not speaking of ...

A few years ago, I had the bright idea of writing a book about arsenic in the 19th century. In preparation for writing it, I bought scores of books on this fascinating subject, ...