Advice to investors. In last week’s column “Don’t Sup With a FUP” I offered a golden nugget of life advice to the younger generation: Now that we know that Greece is the geographical equivalent of Lindsay Lohan, perhaps I should do another advice column, this one addressed to bankers and investors: If I do so,... Read More

This week’s column is in the noble Derbian tradition of advice to the younger generation. From the aery height of three score and ten I offer you nuggets of wisdom, wrenched with difficulty and some pain from a lifetime’s observation and reflection. Pay attention, you millennials and Gen Z-ers! There’ll be a quiz period afterwards.... Read More

T.S. Eliot’s observation that “human kind cannot bear very much reality” is surely up among the half-dozen wisest things ever said about our common nature. There is, of course, individual variation in how much reality we can bear. I flatter myself by believing I am up toward the high end. I readily admit, however, that... Read More

Here it comes, the big seven-oh. Next Wednesday to be exact; around 6:45 GMT, to be even more exact. It was quite an entrance, as I recorded in We Are Doomed. Making it to seventy is not much nowadays. “Seventy is the new fifty,” my friends assure me. As the scriptural limit, though, seventy is... Read More

All of us by now, with the possible exception of some Sentinelese Islanders, are acquainted with the notion of Artifical Intelligence (AI). Most of us have read the news stories about how some alarming proportion of jobs—including middle-class careers like doctoring, lawyering, and accountancy—will soon yield to automation. It’s scary. How will our kids make... Read More

Virtue totalitarianism. For devout Christian bakers, florists, and photographers throughout the U.S.A., the message going out from the news recently has been the one Anouk Aimee received from a helpful stranger she met while crossing the desert in the 1962 movie Sodom and Gomorrah: “Watch out for Sodomite patrols!” My impression from these recent events... Read More

[Scene: A bakery store somewhere in the U.S.A.] Customer: “Good morning!” Store clerk: “Hello. How may I help you?” Customer: “Do you do wedding cakes?” Clerk: “Yes, we do.” Customer: “Great. My partner and I are getting married. We need a cake for the reception.” Clerk: “OK, but I have to ask: Are you and... Read More

What things make us laugh? In all times and places the top draws have been sex, class, and race. The precise way these major themes tickle our funnybones varies with social trends, reflecting back to us the way we live now. This entirely unoriginal observation was prompted by watching another episode of The Big Bang... Read More

Reading Steven Goldberg’s Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences the other day, I got to his 1998 essay on the Clinton scandals. Steve starts off with an Oscar Wilde quote: That got a fist-pump from me. Where matters of opinion and taste are concerned, not many find me on the same page as Oscar... Read More

We live, as I have noted before, in a beggars’ democracy: There is no chance that any of us beggars out on the dissident right will have the chance to publicly quiz the 2016 presidential hopefuls. We can dream, though. If I could ask the hopefuls 20 questions each, here is what I would ask... Read More

Here’s a clip from my read-it-and-weep folder. It showed up in a February 11th Washington Post article, headline: “College sexual assault prevention has unlikely model: U.S. service academies.” Midshipmen—that is, trainee officers—at the U.S. Naval Academy are being broken to the state ideology, Cultural Marxism. We listen in on a class discussion. Speaking personally, I’d... Read More

Local headlines here in New York State recently have been dominated by corruption in the state legislature. The speaker of the lower house, the State Assembly, has had to resign his position after being arrested last month on federal corruption charges. The arrest was deeply unsurprising. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was known for years to... Read More

It’s been a while—blimey, 12 years—since I did an FAQs column, so here are a few from the email bag (in responding to which I am as usual far behind, sorry sorry). How’s your health? (I had an engagement with cancer three years ago.) Excellent, thanks. I check in every six months with the oncologist,... Read More

It is now nearly a hundred years since H.G. Wells remarked in his book The Outline of History that: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” It was an odd thing to write in 1920, when the dust was still settling from a stupendous orgy of mutual slaughter led by... Read More

I recently spent some time making a table for my kitchen, with the assistance of a dear friend whose hobby is cabinetry, and who is generous with his time and equipment. (Thanks, pal!) We made measurements and plans, then purchased good-quality wood. We cut, jointed and planed, glued and clamped, tenoned and mortised. We shaped,... Read More

I was a bit surprised to learn recently that the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs (hereinafter DID) is still on the air. DID is older than I am. It’s been broadcast every week since 1942. The intro music—seagulls, surf breaking on a shore—was part of the background acoustics of my 1950s childhood in England.... Read More

I maintain some vestigial links to the old country. Among them is the inclusion of the London Daily Telegraph in my morning trawl through the online news. It’s sheer sentimentality on my part. The Telegraph was one of the first major outlets to publish me, back in the 1980s. At that time it was a... Read More

I recently did a duplex book review for a respectable conservative quarterly (relevant issue not yet in print). The two books I reviewed, this one and this one, were of the boosterist type, the boosteree in both cases being the U.S.A. Our country has a glorious future, these authors say. The editor who sent me... Read More

Zero Shades of Gray. The U.S. Supreme Court punted on homosexual “marriage” the other day. I can’t summon up much interest, having long since sunk into fatalism on the issue. The cultural revolutionaries are going to shove this absurd notion down our throats [sic] and there’s nothing we can do to stop them. As a... Read More

The Derbs—Mr., Mrs., and Missy—spent two weeks in Alaska. Here are some random observations. Positively the last family vacation. Most people who visit Alaska nowadays arrive on cruise ships, which seem to get bigger every time I see one. Juneau’s harbor is a cruise ship parking lot. There were five of the behemoths there when... Read More

Do I get downhearted? Yes I do. You think it’s easy, living on the red pill? In that world-bestriding bestseller We Are Doomed I introduced readers to the theory of Depressive Realism, launched by psychologists Taylor and Brown in 1988: If it’s well-adjustedness you want for yourself, and a minimum of subjective distress, take the... Read More

From the police blotter: Sounds nasty. In this or any other particular case there may be circumstances we don’t know—but there is no doubt that rape happens. The law codes of civilized countries consider it a heinous crime, and rightly so. If events transpired as reported, Mr. Rodriguez should do serious time. Now consider the... Read More

I have just finished reading David Lebedoff’s 2008 book The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. No, this isn’t a book review—it’s a bit late for that—only some loose reflections on what Lebedoff wrote, as it relates to our present circumstances. Orwell and Waugh are the two big names in... Read More

You can’t faze a New Yorker. After all these years in the Big Apple, I really should know better than to try conclusions with the natives. Place: Track 8 platform at the Long Island Railroad hub in Jamaica, New York City. Time: May 20, 11:50 P.M. Derb’s condition: Seriously over-served. As I emerge from the... Read More

A few columns ago I mentioned in passing that the Mrs. and I had been watching Breaking Bad. This brought some inquiries about whether we got to the end of it, and what I thought. Here are the answers. Yes, we got to the end, after four months or so of Saturday-night marathons via Netflix.... Read More