The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

Former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam died recently , at age 98. Predictable hagiographies followed, with cringe-inducing link titl...

It always warms my heart when the mere title of an essay makes me laugh. Herein, the estimable Theodore Dalrymple, with ' Your Dad is No...

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...

One of the criticisms I sometimes hear of behavioral finance, mostly from the rational crowd, is that one is just showing that 'people a...

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

Well, Scottish independence has come and gone, thank God. The list of grievances being cited was pathetic enough to make even the complaint...

One of the key meta-points of the rationality crowd  is that one needs to explicitly think about problem-solving, because one's intuitio...

It is probably not a surprise to most readers of this august periodical to find out that I yield to few people in my appreciation for econom...

Dinosaurs are endlessly fascinating things. They may be one of the biggest common denominators interest of among young children, both male a...

It recently occurred to me that I have a very poor memory, but not in the standard way that people suspect. By most metrics, I rememb...

Curses on you, all you great problems! Let someone else beat his head against you, someone more stupid. Oh, just to rest there from the int...

There is something deeply appealing about a city built on a road grid. Not just because of my love of order and planning, either. You can ar...

Making this a double dose of Hal G.P. Colebatch, if there has been a better poem title than: 'Observing a thong-shod pedestrian's ...

"And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It 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 ...

So another World Cup has come and gone. Enough water had passed under the bridge that I no longer resented Argentina for their dismal perfor...

' Vaguely Rude Place Names of the World ' It's good to see Australia get some decent representation in there.

So Brazil gets humiliatingly crushed in the World Cup by Germany, 7-1. While there is much to be said about this, mostly in the way of crue...

Apropos nothing, the great Earl Scruggs, playing 'Foggy Mountain Breakdown' (which he in fact wrote), the best banjo tune perhaps si...

One of the things that Sam Peltzman most famously taught us (or perhaps reminded us) is that one should always pay attention to income effec...

Back in 2003, in the lead-up to the Iraq War, a younger Shylock Holmes was an ardent neoconservative. Democracy was, in my view at the time...

In real life (certainly in this country, though not nearly as much in Australia), I've sometimes been accused of having no filter on wha...

Continued from Part 1 . If you've just joined us, we're giving a good fisking to the Mayo Clinic's worthless list of STD ri...