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Cultural Caviar

Plants Are People Too!

The problem of loneliness seems to be growing. New research demonstrates many gardeners these days have a more intimate relationship with the blooms in their borders, rockeries, pots, and window boxes than they do with most other actual humans. A newly publicized Australian study has claimed that one in seven plant owners now possess a “deep love” for their items of greenery, enjoying “highly connected” relationships with them to the extent of considering them their family members. As many as 42 percent of those questioned admitted to being “emotionally attached” to their ...

Bad Language

The only interesting question for me about insurance, health, or otherwise is whether the insurance companies or their clients are the more dishonest. No doubt there is a ...

Semitical Thinking

A number of own goals by the Trump administration led to Democratic resistance finally stiffening in April. Yet Trump’s impressively aggressive war on wokeness continues to ...

Dammed if You Do, Dammed if You Don’t

Strange news from the Czech Republic (or Czechia, or Czech-Land, or World of Czechs, or whatever the place has decided to call itself this month), where a colony of beavers have ...

Right on Queue

Consider the humble bus queue, what it tells us. People line up waiting for a bus to arrive and sometimes are disappointed because the bus is so full that there is not room for ...

Goleta, California

Living Hell?

"Climate change will make earth a living hell!" claims popular astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I don't believe him. The media say, "All Arctic ice will soon melt away! ...

Mussolini and the Quadrumvirs during the March on Rome in 1922

Is Benito Finito, or Just Getting Started?

This week marks eighty years since the death of Mussolini on 28 April 1945. All the more surprising, then, that he is currently Italy’s reigning Man of the Year. The ...

Pope Francis

Popes and Circumstance

I confess (if I may use the word in this context) that I had little regard for the late pope. I took against him, as it were, early in his papacy when I saw his reaction to some ...

Memorial Church, Harvard Campus

Give Us the Money! Harvard Fights for Us All

Amid the boredom of a non-Christian pope's death and the media's obsession with the Signal messaging app, I found myself reading about Pearl Harbor this week. It seems that as ...

Unoriginal ‘Sinners’

Directing a film is a little like coaching a football team—both are jobs for natural leaders of men—but strikingly few auteurs played serious team sports after age 18. Ron ...

Jesus of Nazireth: Hitler and Christ Reborn for Easter

When I was still a boy, there was a saying, now rather out of fashion, used by critics to blast politicians or other figures of authority whenever they had formulated yet another ...

The Folly of Molly: Dublin’s “Sexually Abused” Female Statue

How is it possible to “sexually harass” a statue? You’d have to ask Dublin City Council, who have just declared an innovative new experiment in protecting a supposedly ...

British Guiana 1856

Approval of Stamps

A French antiquarian bookseller from whom I buy books from time to time sends them to me through the post with old-fashioned postage stamps on the packet. How pleased I am when I ...

Ape Bridge, Century City, Los Angeles

The Battle of Ape Bridge

Did I ever tell you my favorite memory from the George Floyd riots of 2020? I live-tweeted about it at the time, but since my X account was nuked, I suppose I can tell the tale ...

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