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 manufacturer, whose name I shall not reveal. The catalog was lying about in a friend's house in New York and I picked it ...

Shortly after my arrival for a short visit to New York City, I had the happy idea of going to the criminal courts on Centre Street. They are the Metropolitan Opera of the criminal-justice system, and as an occasional expert witness in British courts, I wanted to see how these things were done in ...

An English judge called Beverley Lunt, known locally for her leniency, recently suspended the prison sentence of two brothers who appeared before her because they were contrite, or rather because they expressed contrition, which, as we shall see, is not quite the same thing. They were charged with ...

These days there is a lot of monomania about. But then perhaps there always was. Speaking for myself, I am a serial monomaniac. I become obsessed for a short time by a subject and then drop it and do not return to it. Once I nearly drove my wife mad with Le Corbusier, the abominable Franco-Swiss ...

I have reached the age of making lists of things to do. This is partly an implicit recognition of declining powers, but also the result of a long-standing desire, so far never fulfilled, of making myself efficient in the way that managers are supposed to make employees efficient. I want to turn ...

Having, like most journalists, made a career of lamenting the state of the world, I find that I am easily subject to feelings of guilt. To read the corpus of my work you might easily suppose that we lived in a world in which it was impossible to be happy. Yet when I look back, not only I but most ...

Of all the subjects of academic study, psychology is probably the most useless, or at least the most useless by comparison with its pretensions to use. In a century and a half, it has not told us anything of undisputed value. It is subject to absurd fashions, and its published experiments, even ...

It is strange what moves people to action, if signing a petition counts as action"€”which, given the sedentary nature of so much of the population, I suppose it might do. According to a newspaper article I have just read, 140,000 people in Britain signed a petition to have a man with the ...

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 numerous both absolutely and proportionately than ever before in human history. A single detail caught my imagination: One ...

One should not speak ill of the dead, of course, especially of the recently dead, but it does not follow that one should speak well of them, or speak of them at all. Personally I was astonished at the amount of coverage given to the death of David Bowie. One might have thought he was really a ...