That was me last week. It was a doubleheader. Sunday the 20th I flew to Tucson for the “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference at the university there. (Shouldn’t that be “towards”? Fowler: “Of the prepositions the –s form is the prevailing one, and the other tends to become literary on the one hand and... Read More

Retired SCOTUS Justice John Paul Stevens wants to amend the U.S. Constitution, I see. The old boy—he’s just turned 94—has a book out in which he proposes six amendments. You can read about them at that first link; or hey, buy the book. I want to play this game. True, I don’t have the jurisprudential... Read More

Standing up for work. So I got a new desk. I’d been reading these news stories about how bad it is for your health to sit all day. The phrase “the sitting disease” has actually been showing up in headlines. Another news story asked: “Is sitting the new smoking?” Hoo-ee. Sitting is what I do... Read More

I’ll be speaking to the American Renaissance conference at the end of this month. (What, you haven’t signed up yet? Still time!) Title of talk: “China, America, and the Chinese in America.” I should be able to work some topical references into the last part, what with California state senator Leland Yee having apparently brought... Read More

Back in the dear old 1950s, when Western Civilization reached its zenith, Edward R. Murrow ran a regular radio spot titled This I Believe, to which persons both eminent and obscure contributed brief spoken essays on the title topic. You can hear Murrow’s original introduction to the series on YouTube. The series fired off a... Read More

In his column the other day, Pat Buchanan quoted the last lines of Robert Southey’s poem ‘The Battle of Blenheim”: That sent me off looking for the poem, and I knew where to look. No, not the Internet. The Internet’s a fine thing in many ways, to be sure, but poetry belongs in books. The... Read More

I see I have once again made the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch Headlines. They link to RightWingWatch.org, who caught me hatefully spewing hateful hatefulness in an interview I gave to blogger Joseph Cotto: Let me pause briefly to wonder how it is that Cultural Marxists get all the dot-org websites, then allow me to... Read More

Is a baseball mitt a toy? How about a trampoline? Is a goose a farm animal or a wild animal? Is chess-playing an art or a science? Do I shelve a novel about China with my fiction books or my China books? These are problems of categorization. Each of us approaches the matter differently. “Hard”... Read More

This year is the centenary of the late great pop mathematician Martin Gardner (1914-2010). A posthumous autobiography (you don’t see that phrase often) appeared last fall. In 1957, Gardner published a book titled Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, debunking things such as extrasensory perception and Dianetics. I read the book in my... Read More

“The book that people are reading now,” according to Lion of the Blogosophere, is Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s The Second Machine Age. I hastened to buy a copy and read it…so you don’t have to! The authors are professional Deep Thinkers with positions at the MIT Center for Digital Business, which you can read about at... Read More

A concerned reader sent me a link to this video in which, he said, my name was taken in vain. Yes, I know, it’s an irritating imposition on readers to open a column by linking to a 31-minute video clip. I’ll be offering a concise executive summary in just a moment, with links into the... Read More

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I took heart from the micro-fuss over Jerry Seinfeld’s push-back against PC bullying the other day. In case you missed it, Seinfeld was being interviewed on TV about his recent comedy series. “I have noticed that most of the guests [i.e., on Seinfeld’s series] are mostly white males,” murmured... Read More

The university I attended was (and still is) in west-central London. A fifteen-minute walk from the main campus got you to Tottenham Court Road tube station, with Charing Cross Road heading off to the south toward the theater district and the National Gallery. I was not much of a theater- or gallery-goer, but I did... Read More

“Never darken my door again” was the standard Victorian parting shot to a person you wanted to be rid of. (It was adjusted in one of Bridget Jones’s diaries to: “Never darken my towels again.”) In case it slipped your attention—perhaps because you haven’t been reading my output assiduously enough—there has for six or seven... Read More

The talk is all of pot. Not “pot” the utensil, as in Confucius’s fine aphorism “A man is not a pot,” but cannabis sativa, AKA grass, tea, weed, bud, ganja, Mary Jane, bhang, wacky baccy. States are legalizing the stuff all over, although, since pot remains federally proscribed, there are some tricky matters of jurisdiction... Read More

Tightwad corner. If, like me, you never learned to touch-type; and if, also like me, you work your laptop to death; and if, like mine, your machine is a cheapo model; then you have watched with dismay as the letters get worn away from your laptop keys. By the end of 2013 I had utterly... Read More

“The first episode of Downton Abbey‘s fourth season was watched by 10.2 million people in the US on Sunday, a record for a series premiere on PBS.” So says the BBC. That’s a lot of viewers, putting the upstairs-downstairs aristocratic soap opera up there in popularity with major sporting events and Duck Dynasty. I was... Read More

Look, it’s no fun being the designated race reporter at Taki’s Mag. When I joined the contributor list I ticked “opera critic” as my preferred slot on the masthead. Then I got into one of those dumb spin-the-bottle games with Jim, Gavin, Kathy, and Mandolyna, lost four times in a row, and ended up assigned... Read More

In a recent edition of Radio Derb I mentioned the advantages of moving to Iceland but added: “The downside is, you have to not mind living on a volcano.” One listener—there’s always one—saw my volcano and raised me a supervolcano, attaching this news clip: This hasn’t actually happened since 637,987 BC, but the boffins reckon... Read More

You remember Caligula. John Hurt played him with creepy malignity in the old BBC production of I, Claudius. Caligula was the third emperor of Rome on a strict count (which doesn’t include Julius Caesar), the fourth of the Twelve Caesars written up by the historian Suetonius. At age 24 Caligula succeeded his great-uncle Tiberius, the... Read More

Little more than a hundred years ago the modern British welfare state was born in David Lloyd George’s 1909 finance bill, the “people’s budget.” Hearing of the bill’s provisions—old-age pensions! unemployment benefits! land taxes! (in those innocent times it was thought prudent to pay for social programs with taxation)—Rudyard Kipling was furious. He vented his... Read More

I heard the word “Techintern” for the first time the other day. It’s not exactly current. A Google search for the word brought up 17,000 results, all of which, for as long as I could be bothered to browse, related to interns at tech firms. Some finer tuning on the search arguments turned up a... Read More

This time last year all I was hearing about was MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses, in which university-level instruction, sometimes by big-name lecturers, is provided free over the Internet to anyone who wants it. Some visionaries were talking about MOOCs eventually bankrupting traditional universities. Apparently that’s not going to happen. There is a niche for MOOCs,... Read More

I was in England for Remembrance Sunday this year. The wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph was very moving. I had forgotten how much emotion the British invest in this and how high a proportion is imaginatively keyed to WWI. Remembrance Sunday is defined to be the Sunday closest to Armistice Day, November 11, when the... Read More

I note with interest that January 1, 2014 marks the centenary of scheduled commercial passenger airplane flights. I note with further interest, although the interest now has some dark tones, that my own experience as a plane passenger will cover nearly half of those hundred years. On August 25, 1965, I took wing from London... Read More