A short while ago, I read a review of a history of pedantry. A pedant, I take it, is a man who delights more in error than in truth. He does not want to learn, he wants to ...

If these days I stay in an expensive hotel, it is because someone else has paid for it. Left to my own devices, I stay in cheap hotels because I prefer them. There was a time, ...

The modern world is one of both convenience and inconvenience. For example, you can buy an air ticket in a trice (who remembers travel agents, airline offices, and laboriously ...

Like most human beings, I have my moments of envy (some of us have more than mere moments, of course, and make of envy the ruling passion of their lives). When I see the vast ...

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has been one of the English-speaking world’s leading public intellectuals for the past three decades. But rather than retire to full-time ...

Very shortly before he was shot dead by a single bullet in front of 3,000 students in Utah, Charlie Kirk had the following exchange with a student: STUDENT: Do you know how many ...

Sitting in a café in a station in France recently, I observed a young man sitting near me gazing into his telephone screen. No cobra hypnotized by a snake charmer could have been ...

Human error, wrote Prof. James Reason in his book on that widespread phenomenon, is a large subject, and so is stupidity. To inform myself further on it, I recently bought in ...

Way back in the 1970s, I was fascinated by cosmology, the study of the origin of the universe. It had been discovered by Edwin Hubble in the 1920s at the Mt. Wilson observatory, ...

Convention is like nature: You throw it out with a pitchfork, yet it will return. The very attempt to escape it as such, merely because it is convention, is itself deeply ...

A kindly friend of mine drew my attention to an article in the Guardian newspaper about a British couple, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, who are currently being held hostage, or as ...

In the days when I would occasionally report from far-flung and obscure countries—not far-flung and obscure to their inhabitants, of course—I would often rely on the opinions ...

A suspended doctor in England is running a company that sells people sick notes to excuse them on medical grounds from their work. “When you’re ill,” said an advertisement ...

Often on Saturdays, outside a small supermarket in the town in which I live in England, stands a swarthy woman in her 30s who wears a black scarf around her head. She is not ...

I’ve read numberless op-eds in recent years lamenting conservative distrust of scientific experts. Yet, progressives are remarkably anti-expert when it comes to the venerable ...

The poet A.E. Housman once wrote a poem about the impossibility of ignoring reality by means of permanent intoxication. The short poem ends: But men at whiles are sober And think ...