Ours is a golden age of expensive cheap trash"€”or is it cheap expensive trash? Such, at any rate, were my thoughts on leafing through a catalog of a luxury gewgaw and clothes ...

The Bahamas"€”A calm swath of turquoise sea protected by a hundred-mile string of islands and cays delimit the Atlantic's blue-dark depths, to the east: an organic barrier as ...

A recent paper in The New England Journal of Medicine describes the use of surgery to reduce the weight of grossly fat adolescents between the ages of 13 and 19, who are more ...

2016 will be a hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year that the greatest Greek writer since Homer will turn 80, but we won"€™t mention this fact for ...

If pure, absolute evil needed one day to be translated into a singular eponym, George Soros would be the perfect choice. This is at least the impression that comes to mind when we ...

I am no great admirer of management as a science or of managers as people. The latter tend to speak a strange language, a jargon neither elegant nor poetic; they buy very dull ...

I hate sweet drinks"€”Coca-Cola et al."€”so passionately that I grow angry whenever I see someone buy or drink one. I hate their taste, I hate the horrible plastic bottles in ...

What I don"€™t know about sex can fill a book. (Literally!) But somehow, contrary to the natural order of things, I became more naive as I entered my fifth decade. For example: ...

Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier) was one of the people killed in the attack on Charlie Hebdo on 7 January this year. He was a writer and editor as well as a cartoonist, and ...

Life is full of little ironies, one of them in my case being that I have more time than ever before, now that I have retired from practice, to read medical journals. I find the ...

Nearly five hundred years ago, as the story goes, those sexually repressed Pilgrims"€”wearing tight religious apparel that restricted crucial blood flow to their genital ...

Someone must have noticed that I waste a lot of my time, because I received today, through the Internet, an offer of a new method of something called personal time management. ...

On the whole I am in favor of freedom of expression, though sometimes I am equally in favor of freedom from expression. God preserve us from film stars telling us what they ...

Opera has been in the news lately, in Paris and New York, that is. And no, this doesn"€™t mean things are culturally looking up; on the contrary, I"€™m afraid. Let's start ...

What do you call a socialist who tries to make money selling books? The answer isn"€™t just Noam Chomsky; it's every socialist who walks the earth. The soothsayers of ...

Only barroom bores bemoan the real-life dearth of science fiction's long promised "€œflying cars."€ (As I"€™ve said before, we already have flying cars. They"€™re called ...