Children at Checkout

It is a trope of many intellectuals that to stack shelves in a supermarket, or to work at a supermarket checkout, is the worst fate that can befall a human being. Such a job is regarded as the very epitome of dead-endedness, though a dead end is what we are all progressing toward anyway, and many people do not particularly want excitement on the way to that inevitable dead end. They want peace and tranquility instead: As some of my patients used to ask, “Can’t you give me something to stop me thinking, doctor?” It was not any particular thoughts that they wanted to cease to think: It ...

Keeping Up With Japan

Everyone lives in his own little world and unless he makes a special effort from time to time to enlarge it, there is a tendency with age for it to collapse in on itself and ...

The Food Police

The world, said James Boswell, is not to be made a great hospital; but to a hammer everything is a nail, and to doctors and medical journals everything is either a medical problem ...

Blind Luck?

There is a little Italian restaurant that we usually go to soon after our arrival in Paris, an unpretentious place where the pasta is good. It has a friendly atmosphere, and by ...

Chiefs and Bottom-Feeders

Recently, a Belgian politician did something unusual for a modern politician: He acted almost honorably. He was the Minister of Justice when two Swedish football supporters were ...

White Knighting for Middle East Unsalvageables

So there used to be a self-described “gay Nazi chef” in Sacramento named Walter Mueller (or as I called him, Emeril Lagassechamber). Back in 2003, during my year off from life ...

Revenge of the Goy Golems

Told ya. From the beginning of the “Groyper movement” and the ascension of Nick Fuentes’ Nazibois, I’ve been warning rightists to be wary of those loons. My advice was ...

What’s in Store

Is it a sign of advancing age that the world seems to grow more absurd by the day, or does the world really grow more absurd by the day? If the latter, it means that there is an ...

A Secret Garden

One of my few remaining ambitions is to catalog my library—if that is not too grand a word for my accumulation of books. Certainly, I have known municipal libraries with fewer ...

The Gathering Fog (A Horror Story)

Recently I’ve been thinking about James Herbert’s 1975 book The Fog, which I read when it was first published (I’ve been a horror fan since childhood; as a kid there ...

Cirque de la Madeleine, Gorges de l'Ardèche

Saint of What?

Opening my copy of the French newspaper Le Figaro recently, there was a long article titled “With Gustave Thibon in the Ardèche: the Saint and the Peasant.” I was in the ...

The Flowering of Mediocrity

When someone is said to be lacking in ambition, it is usually meant as a criticism, as if people had a transcendent moral duty to be ambitious. How else but by ambition will ...

New Pugs Club Member?

Our cleaning lady in France brings her dog with her. The dog has been a great solace to her during a difficult stage in her life. She bought her from a breeder who used her as a ...

For Goodness’ Sake

Some years ago, in Australia, I appeared on a platform with a prominent intellectual, many times more famous than I. We were asked what it took to be good. The famous ...


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