An old friend of mine who once ran a small publishing house told me that a swastika on the cover of a book increased its sales by 30 percent, irrespective of the book’s subject ...

One of the unintended consequences of teachers using COVID to refuse to do their jobs in 2020 is that their students suddenly had to take classes remotely -- within earshot of ...

Of late, I have taken a walk almost every day in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, which is near my flat in Paris. It is said that 3 million people are interred in the cemetery, and ...

A few weeks ago, I saw my first lizard of spring—except, of course, that it was still January, which is to say winter. The weather, however, was unseasonably warm, and I suppose ...

One of the few benefits of the continuing restrictions imposed on us during the seemingly endless pandemic now afflicting most of the world is that they have forced us to live ...

Thanks to my pessimism, I am generally quite cheerful (it is optimists who, because of their illusions, are most prey to misery). I do not expect that all the difficulties of life ...

The mice in my absence have been at my books again, with what Marx called, with regard to the manuscript of his then-unpublished Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German ...

On Christmas Day I sat by the fire in my house in France and read a charming little book, Tea With Walter de la Mare, by Russell Brain, published in 1957. Walter de la Mare, who ...

Armed with the necessary certificate to justify my journey from France to the Netherlands, my presence in the latter country having become “indispensable,” I spent a couple of ...

With the Amy Coney Barrett hearings in full swing this week, my mailbox has been overflowing with questions from absolutely no readers! Here, I will deliver the answers that no ...

My understanding of economics must be deficient, or else my personal experience of the world is misleading. Both are possible, of course: None of us can experience more than an ...

Sometimes, like little Greta Thunberg, I long for the days when people had fewer possessions and cared for those few that they had. For example, they would have only a small ...

This is the year everything went wrong. The year that the dried, cracked, and frayed rubber band that seemed to be holding everything together finally snapped from all the ...

Between a hollyhock and a lavender in my garden is suspended a spider’s web. There is a part in which the prey is caught, and another part, a funnel, in which the spider waits ...

Most people, I suppose, would be pleased by the death of a rat that lived near their house, but this is probably because they are much more likely to see a rat already dead than a ...

A friend of my wife’s wants to tidy her house before she dies. As she has not done so for forty years so far, it is unlikely that she will succeed. In like fashion, I want to ...