The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

I finally got around to watching the last episode of House the other day. It wasn’t too bad. I won’t spoil the ending, but it finishes with ...

This is something I'm guilty of myself, and it's a strange behaviour. We can rule out some of the obvious cases. Blogs that discus...

-The Last Psychiatrist has a great essay about self-destructive behaviour . -I got 99 problems, but an incorrect understanding of criminal...

The contemporary mind, as illustrated by Ms. Roiphe's, has fundamental problems grasping useful concepts like "on average" and...

If you want some hilarious reading, check out the website ' Miss Travel '. Lest my screeds prejudice your impressions, let's j...

So today was one of those cases of getting unreasonably excited by something completely trivial and ridiculous. It's taken three years...

Charter Cities are an interesting example of how modern development might work. As pioneered by Paul Romer, the basic idea is that they wou...

I came across this old interview with Theodore Dalrymple, when he's talking about his [thoroughly excellent] book ' Life At The Bot...

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

So I'm about half way through the Obamacare ruling - so far, I've gotten through the Roberts opinion and the Ginsburg opinion. My t...

In the annals of hilariously lame administrative @$$-covering messages, I always enjoy receiving these emails: 'Department [X] would li...

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