Passing Observations 194

    The Office for National Statistics reckons that 5.6 million immigrants will come to England over the next decade. And 3.4 million tax-paying, largely white English people will leave in despair. Those are the official figures. The real figures will, inevitably,

Who is the asshole?

Consider famous moments of moral crisis throughout the ages, real or imagined. Peter denying that he knew Jesus before the cock crowed, say; or Jean Paul Sartre’s former pupil in Existentialism Is A Humanism, torn between joining the Free French …

The impossible truth about Afghanistan

In “The Impossible Fact”, the 20th-century German poet Christian Morgenstern tells the story of an academic who undergoes a traumatising experience. He staggers home, wraps damp cloths around his forehead and collapses into his armchair to process what has happened. …