Hillary Clinton, so we are told, kept a spreadsheet devoted to her enemies, whom she rated on a scale of her own devising. I can"t say this surprised me: Mrs. Clinton doesn"t have a forgiving face. She is more Lady Macbeth than Cordelia (she ...
The temper of the times is often revealed by small details in newspapers, and that is why (I tell myself) I still read them, though it is common wisdom that they are on the path to extinction, as dinosaurs were after the great meteor hit the earth ...
According to a poll carried out by the Figaro newspaper, only 17% of the French believe that 2014 will be a good year, but in fact it started very well for France. Only 1,064 cars were burned by youths in the banlieues this New Year’s ...
My late friend, the distinguished economist Peter Bauer, used to say that the only true unemployment in the modern world was among satirists, for the world had grown so ridiculous that what was intended as satire was either a description of what ...
Chile is one of many faraway countries of which I know nothing, but I was intrigued to read in the French press of its recent presidential election. Socialist candidate Michelle Bachelet won by a large majority of the votes cast: 62.16% against ...
The unctuous pseudo-grief in the West after Nelson Mandela's death at the good age of 95 was to me nauseating in the extreme; it was so overdone that, though I am no Freudian, it raised suspicions in my mind of reaction formation, the psychological ...
I think I suffer from the only behavioral disorder that does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. This is rather odd because the disorder has been known for at least two centuries, ever since ...
I suppose everyone has his madeleine moment"that experience, sensory or otherwise, that awakens in him a long train of memories. Actually, the longer one lives the more madeleine moments there are. The other day, for example, I had one while ...
Every night and every morn Some to misery are born, Every morn and every night Some are born to sweet delight. The first couplet of Blake's verse seems to me a good deal more certain than the second because happiness and misery, while opposite, ...
Reading recently a monograph about the lives of heroin addicts in preparation for an article about addiction I had been commissioned to write, I came across a couple of comparatively new locutions that irritate me: sex work and sex worker. What is ...
Yesterday morning, as I was sitting in the flat on Paris that I have rented for a time quietly finishing my latest book, Murderers I Have Known (and I have known quite a few), a furious row broke out in the street six floors below. I went out onto ...
Most people read to confirm their prejudices rather than to learn something new or change their minds. Moreover, they recall what confirms their opinions much better than they remember what contradicts them. So aware was Charles Darwin of this human ...
