Perhaps because this has seemed like the coldest winter I can recall in normally balmy Southern California, I got to wondering: Why do northerners tend to be smarter than southerners? Is it because of the north’s cold winters, as ...

I wouldn’t recognize stock manipulation or accountancy fraud at its most blatant, but it doesn’t surprise me when others discover it. After murder, fraud was one of the first crimes committed by mankind. Jacob indulged it with the ...

Immediately on reading of the recent mass shooting in Monterey Park that resulted in eleven deaths, or twelve if you count the perpetrator of it, I looked up the town on the internet, never having heard of it before. I was immediately ...

Few of us who live in modern countries can see the stars at night, or more than a few at most. This is because of light pollution, the production of artificial light at night that is not strictly necessary (though what is not strictly ...

It is much easier, and more fun, to denounce bad behavior than to behave well. Denunciation brings its pleasures, among which is the discomfiture, or worse, of the person or persons denounced. We love to imagine the squirming of someone ...

My relatively scant hair having grown into a porcupine-type mess and having both a video podcast and a dinner party to attend on the same day, I went to my barber to smarten myself up a little. His is still a cash-only business. No ...

Were it not for the fact that I have been losing things from the time I possessed anything to lose, I should have taken my inability to find my credit card recently as a sign of incipient cognitive decline. I panicked—not at the ...

For all of us who scribble for publication, at however low a level, all activities other than writing take on at most a secondary importance. Even meals, necessary as they no doubt are, can come to seem unwanted interruptions of the ...

Financial collapses are interesting and sometimes hilarious for those who observe them, but painful for those who suffer them. In addition to the economic discomfort or hardship they cause is the humiliation of having been fool enough ...

Perhaps it is because of my age that I am coming to resemble Roderick Usher and his abomination of noise (not that I ever liked it much), despite the fact that, according to a recent hearing test, I have lost 15 percent of my aural ...

A British nurse called Miranda Hughes said in a television debate that people who voted Conservative didn’t deserve to be resuscitated in the National Health Service (NHS). There was an immediate outcry: How could any nurse say that ...

Eighty-two years ago, when Mussolini attacked Greece, the people—deeply offended—simply fought back. Their response followed Plato’s definition of a situation whereby the desire to win a fight is fueled by the desire to have ...