The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

Sometimes when I travel, the things that are striking are the absences compared with my home (adopted, in this case). America is very much t...

It is interesting to compare the fate of two St Paul’s Churches. The one in London was famously and mercifully intact and mostly unharmed a...

-If you want to see how long-lived civic effects can operate, just compare Mannheim and Heidelberg. Both have quite famous universities. One...

It is left as an exercise to the reader to show that, under the law of one price and the absence of arbitrage, the market-clearing pric...

-I never tire while in foreign countries of seeing the subtle differences in appearance of people. German men often have a certain demeanor ...

Part 1, from Junot Diaz - The Cheater's Guide to Love . If you take out the infidelity part (which, ultimately, is only a plot opener fo...

On matters of macroeconomics, I am mostly an agnostic in the classical sense - one who is unsure where everyone else (in the original, stupi...

-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...