The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

Continuing my descent into old fogey-ness, I seem to have encountered another shift in the zeitgeist that marks off my age. The first one wa...

Some excellent thoughts from the good doctor : “Do you care about the health of the planet?” is a question not quite in the class of “Hav...

Social customs are strange things. Some rules are totally arbitrary (fork on the left, knife on the right), but usually these end up being c...

Have you noticed that when sitting at a dinner table, conversations have centres of gravity? Not as in metaphorical centres of gravity about...

Bumper stickers that announce 'My Child is an Honor Student at [XYZ] Elementary School'. To me, this just seems to be the height o...

As part of your introverted correspondent's mission to understand social conventions, I find myself interested in what personal question...

One of the most striking modern pathologies is the nervous twitch of obsessively checking one's phone. I use the terms 'obsessive&...

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on how American children end up so spoiled . They relate it to the idea of parents doing ever more f...

One of my minor quests in life is to find ways around small inconveniences in life arising from  people asking (and answering) the wrong que...

One of the things I missed while I was away was the chance to comment in a timely fashion on this interesting piece by Ken at Popehat on t...

Are there any restaurant policies more obnoxious than the 'No Substitutions' written on a menu? It seems that every wannabe hipster ...

Opening someone else’s mail. This used to be a big deal. But think about it – how much important personal business is actually conducted by ...

I never understood why so many people want to buy cards that have messages already written in them. I know I'm in the small minority o...