The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

-One of the most striking things about New Orleans during Mardi gras, oddly enough, is the attitude of the police. (Okay, lest you be quest...

One phrase that in practice means almost the exact opposite of what it claims is the expression 'scientifically proven'. I have kn...

I cannot for the life of me understand why courts still award alimony. Not child support - that still mostly makes sense in principle, tho...

So Jordan is in the news recently. A Jordanian fighter pilot who had been captured by ISIS was burned alive on camera. So Jordan executed tw...

The number of people who write interesting, nuanced pieces on Islam is shockingly low. Either all Muslims are crazy, or all Muslims are pea...

I recently saw 'The Imitation Game', the new Benedict Cumberbatch movie about the role of Alan Turing in solving the Enigma Code in ...

"Thus, posterity's jest. Pre-war Europeans would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques from Malmö to Mar...

Part 1. CC: I'm off to see that movie, Selma , tonight. Shylock: Here's a prediction for you. I'll bet you that at absolutel...

It's taken me a while to write about the Charlie Hedbo killings. It takes me a while to write anything anymore in this august journal, b...

Political correctness, like all successful forms of social censorship, tends to go through two phases. There is a loud phase, where averag...

What does absurd government monomania in the face technological irrelevance look like? Back in the early years of the 20th century, before...

Here's one to file under the category of 'things that may have been obvious to most well-adjusted people, but were at least a little...

There comes a point in one’s life where one surrenders to the lure of the practical, rather than the romantic. Bit by bit, the arguments fo...

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...