This Property Is Condemned

I wouldn’t recognize stock manipulation or accountancy fraud at its most blatant, but it doesn’t surprise me when others discover it. After murder, fraud was one of the first ...

California

We Are All Psychoanalysts

Immediately on reading of the recent mass shooting in Monterey Park that resulted in eleven deaths, or twelve if you count the perpetrator of it, I looked up the town on the ...

To Matter or Not to Matter

Few of us who live in modern countries can see the stars at night, or more than a few at most. This is because of light pollution, the production of artificial light at night that ...

The Blame Game

It is much easier, and more fun, to denounce bad behavior than to behave well. Denunciation brings its pleasures, among which is the discomfiture, or worse, of the person or ...

Cash Out

My relatively scant hair having grown into a porcupine-type mess and having both a video podcast and a dinner party to attend on the same day, I went to my barber to smarten ...

On Purpose

Were it not for the fact that I have been losing things from the time I possessed anything to lose, I should have taken my inability to find my credit card recently as a sign of ...

Artificial Art

For all of us who scribble for publication, at however low a level, all activities other than writing take on at most a secondary importance. Even meals, necessary as they no ...

A Cloud of Unknowing

Financial collapses are interesting and sometimes hilarious for those who observe them, but painful for those who suffer them. In addition to the economic discomfort or hardship ...

Making a Hell of Heaven

Perhaps it is because of my age that I am coming to resemble Roderick Usher and his abomination of noise (not that I ever liked it much), despite the fact that, according to a ...

Nursing a Grudge

A British nurse called Miranda Hughes said in a television debate that people who voted Conservative didn’t deserve to be resuscitated in the National Health Service (NHS). ...

War Diary

Eighty-two years ago, when Mussolini attacked Greece, the people—deeply offended—simply fought back. Their response followed Plato’s definition of a situation whereby the ...

Job Snobs

A respected journalist and writer of my acquaintance, now retired, always had an interesting, unusual, and unexpected perspective on matters that usually divided people into two ...

News or Chews?

Attentively watching the grass grow in the meadow in front of my house, which is my major contribution to gardening, I saw two dogs approach. They were obviously companions, for ...

The Truth Is Out There

Who is more into conspiracy theories: the right or the left? A new study sheds light on the political tilt of conspiracy theories. First, though, let me admit that I’ve always ...

At Face Value

I noticed a very pretty girl sitting not far from me on a bus ride of about 45 minutes last week. Soon after the bus departed, she took out her makeup and spent about thirty ...

About Face

“There is no art,” says King Duncan in Macbeth, “to find the mind’s construction in the face.” In other words, one cannot tell a person from his face. Well, one has to ...


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