The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

I'm now back from my sojourns abroad, and in the brief period where one is reminded of what is different about one's adopted country...

The most striking feature is the grim look on the faces of all the local men, particularly the young men. It's rare to see them smile at...

If anything captures the 'forced equality at the cost of anything resembling efficiency' aspect of Scandinavia, it's unisex publ...

- If I had to give it a shorthand description, it would be ‘halfway between Helsinki and Amsterdam’. This holds on a number of dimensions be...

Every now and again, I worry that this site may be at risk of being too self-serious. So with rectification in mind, I laughed hella hard ...

-It's very refreshing to see people smoking outdoors in restaurants. Not because I smoke. Nor because I like the smell of smoke while ea...

It seems to be a commonly-repeated trope that the Olympic Village is a crazy party town of non-stop action and poon on tap. Lots of good-loo...

Ozymandias I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on th...

- It's always good when you're watching a group of runners lined up on the track without hearing the earlier announcements, and you ...

Why, that does sound convenient! And some people say that the government doesn't understand customer service. Part 1 here .

People focus on the salient risks. OMG, someone might steal my passport! Fair enough - they might. But truthfully, how high is the risk of...

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...