In December 1953, the CEOs of America’s leading tobacco companies cast aside competitive rancor and gathered at New York City’s Plaza Hotel to confront a menace to their incredibly profitable industry. An emergent body of science published in elite medical …
Will Marine Le Pen defend French Jews?
When more than 100,000 people marched in Paris against antisemitism on 12 November, one participant attracted particular notice: Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-Right Rasssemblement National (“National Rally”). As many recall, the party’s founder, and her father Jean-Marie, was …
Love Really Can Thwart Tyranny
Long before Freud articulated the conflict, or at best the tension between the enduring psychic – and therefore cultural – forces of Eros (life-drive) and Thanatos (death-drive), the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Empedocles, paved the way for this by positing the …
Ridley Scott: our Anglo-Saxon Maximus
A decade ago, I rewatched Gladiator in a freezing cold forward-operating base outside Mosul with Kurdish Peshmerga, cocooned in brightly-coloured blankets. When I complained that the sound wasn’t working on the small television, someone replied “Surely you must know every …
How Modeling Can Go Terribly Wrong
To theorize about our existence is essential. Indeed it could be argued that to think and speak is, in the most basic sense, to impose abstract models upon the multiple and often confusing manifestations of life around us. Without mental …
The Emptiness of the Transhumanist Ideal
Albrecht Durer’s Hare (Feldhase) hangs on a wall in the Albertina museum in Vienna. This picture, or at least prints of it, had meant a lot to me since childhood. I had grown up loving art but lived far from …
When Nearly All Governments in the World Met Their Match
What was the fundamental error of the Covid response?
We’ve yet to come to terms with it. It traces to a far-flung and completely impossible and deeply destructive ambition – with no defined limits to the measures constructed to achieve …
The Declaration That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen
It’s been a continuing mystery for three years, at least to me but many others too. In October 2020, in the midst of a genuine crisis, three scientists made a very short statement of highly public health wisdom, a summary …
What is the Measure of True Freedom?
The measure of freedom in any society is the degree of inclusion for those who stand on the margins, those who linger on the edge, and those who suffer in silence. The potential and eventual realisation of inclusion is evidence …
Critics Cast Doubt on Dr. Drosten’s Doctorate
A clip of Christian Drosten, at the World Health Summit in Berlin, calling for media to suppress “disinformation” went somewhat viral on X recently. “We shouldn’t have [just] anybody who has some academic degree talking about the heart of the …
The US has Lost its First-World Status
Everything is dirty. Nothing works. But everything’s also more expensive. And oh, by the way, you don’t have privacy anymore.
That is how I described life in the US to a friend who had been living abroad for a bit …
Confronting Pandemic Tyranny
I am pleased to share this splendid review of The New Abnormal by Paul Seaton, originally published in Law and Liberty.
In 2019, Aaron Kheriaty was a professor of psychiatry and chair of medical ethics at the University of California …
Explaining the Crisis through Jacques Lacan
The psychoanalytic theorist, Jacques Lacan, has some surprising conceptual tools up his sleeve, some of which can bring some clarity in the oft-confusing world in which we live at present. His theoretical and philosophical oeuvre comprises a wide spectrum, most …
Explaining the Nocebo Effect, Emotional Contagion, and Mass Hysteria
At the beginning of the pandemic, I couldn’t wrap my mind around why so many people were acting in such irrational and self-destructive ways. I had to find a way to explain their behavior, even if just to myself. Despite …
Bearing Eternal Witness to a Scam
When I was growing up in the 1960s-70s, we often played late summer and fall football games in various locations: on streets, vacant lots, school fields, suburban yards, a grocery store parking lot (under the lights) or in parks. In …