The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

John Derbyshire reprints this wonderful essay by Winston Churchill, written in 1947, where he recounts a fictional conversation with his f...

So Obamacare is constitutional . I'm going to swallow my own advice and refrain from commenting on the substance of the case until I&...

The bad news: Chicago is broke, homicides are up 37% this year, and the police department is feeling the strain. The good news:  Chicago i...

Journalists go to play paintball with Hezbollah to see what happens. Psychologically illuminating hilarity ensues : We figured they’d chea...

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...

Some people think that Europe is a bloated, worthless bureacratic state that has managed to transform an attitude of self-important entitlem...

File this one under 'Positive, Not Normative'. I think not nearly enough people give any thought to plausible psychology when inte...

Apologies for the lack of updates, I've been travelling around a fair bit recently. Here's my sociological travelogue. Miami -To...

Nigel Farage lays into the EU over the madness of having the Spanish bailout being funded by the same countries who are themselves on the br...

I find it interesting sometimes to imagine how my worldview might change if I experienced different events. It seems elementary that if you...

Let me repeat a frequent refrain that I hear from smug skinny people from time to time: Hur hur hur. Look at that fat guy at McDonalds, get...

Via Hacker News comes this great observation : Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'. The log...

After the previous post on the subject , I've been making my way through Paul Fussell's book on World War II, ' Wartime: Underst...

An interesting theory of the Chinese economic system . It includes answers to the questions of 'why do the Chinese keep buying US T-Bi...

"No man can ever truly be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune." Boethius , The Consolations of Philosophy

I suspect I joined the ranks of the 'sufficiently wealthy to not sweat the small stuff' when I stopped noticing petrol prices very m...

Further in the category of ' Songs That Are Made By One Really Good Line ' comes the song 'How It Ends', by Devotchka. It wa...

The good news - the US and Israel created the Stuxnet virus to destroy the centrifuges in Iran being used to enrich uranium. I suspected th...

A recurring theme of this blog is that government policies should be honest about what they cost, and who's paying. Few things irritate ...

Every now and again, I find myself reading somebody else's writings, and I'm filled with the urge to yell out to everyone 'Stop ...

It's rare for civic authorities to have a sense of humour, but check out the classic welcome signs  they've had over the years. Come...

I always find the Peace Corps to be an interesting idea. Started by JFK , the idea was that young Americans could go overseas and voluntee...

Via Hacker News comes this amazing article from The Atlantic in 1989, written by Paul Fussell. It describes what World War II was like from...

When magazines I never subscribed to send me letters telling me that my subscription is running out, with the words 'LAST LETTER' on...

The story of Brett Kimberlin is a very scary one about how the American legal system can be used as a weapon to silence criticism. You can r...

I think at this stage in history, there’s not really much question that foreign aid has been a colossal failure. Shovelling money and goods ...

-The awesome story of the development of Apple's Graphing Calculator. -A solid gold strategy for losing weight . The song in question...

Penn Jillette unloads on the Obama administration  about the fact that he continues to support drug policies that lock people up for doing e...

Suppose I were to present you with the following proposition: "Next Sunday morning, I'm going to take a dump on your front lawn. ...

P.G. Wodehouse with a great description (in the wonderful old British style) of the golfing overconfidence of the mediocre: It seemed to h...

The Columbia Law Review is set to publish an article alleging that Texas executed an innocent man  in 1989, Carlos DeLuna. He was convicted ...

Don Ritchie died today . Who is Don Ritchie, you may well ask? A good question. In Sydney, there is a beautiful stretch of cliffs near...

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

An Oregon environmentalist decides to save the planet with reusable shopping bags instead of disposable plastic bags. They instead end up ...