The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

It's rare that I'm ahead of the curve in very much. But the latest Steve Sailer column had the following puzzling claim : Nobody ...

I was in Quebec recently. It's an odd place. Some parts, like the old part of Quebec City, feel like you've somehow set foot into a ...

"Nature," as Mr Emerson once noted , "has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended." A ...

The Dissenting Sociologist began a post  recently with a quite striking sentence: “ The principle that “the wise shall govern the strong” ...

One phrase that in practice means almost the exact opposite of what it claims is the expression 'scientifically proven'. I have kn...

The word ' se'nnight '. It's an archaic word for 'week', being a contraction of 'seven night(s)'. The most i...

From the New York Times In the last few years, unable to hold a list of just four grocery items in my head, I’d begun to fret a bit over ...

We live in an age where people go to enormous lengths to not contemplate mortality – either their own, or anyone else’s, really. In the...

One of my hobbies is to try to imitate foreign accents. It's often convenient for humor purposes to be able to portray a generic person ...

One of my minor hobbies is trying to guess where people were born based on small details about them. A fun way of doing this is with langu...

With small semantic differences. From a conversation earlier today. DG: Man, you like taking long showers. Shylock: Sure do. Why be in a h...

I was listening to a talk by this Greek girl today. I was speaking to The Greek afterwards, and asked him the following: "Hey, does t...

This is not a post about why dumb people are getting worse at spelling. There's lots of obvious culprits - the spreading of teenage tex...

From the excellent 'The House Wins', by OK GO, a wonderful metaphor for the strong form of the No Free Lunches principle * : Ice a...

A properly functioning I.E.D. and an improperly functioning I.U.D. can both really mess up your day.

You learn a lot about trends in popular perceptions of the economy (the corporte zeitgeist, if you will) by looking at what job titles peopl...

Apropos nothing, the great Robert Frost. Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the...

One of the standard markers of being sophisticated is learning a second language. This is regarded as an unadulterated "good thing"...

My latest Pandora find is the thoroughly excellent 'Mr Brown', by Styles of Beyond. This falls into the category both of the current...

One of the laziest rhetorical devices in song-writing is the use of the oppositional 'they'. Usually this is done in relationship so...