Why Radical Islam Just Won’t Die

THE big surprise, viewed from my own narrow perspective five years later, has taken place in the mysterious zones of extremist ideology. In the months and weeks before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote quite a lot about ideology in the Middle East, and especially about the revolutionary political doctrine known as radical Islamism.
I tried [...]

Why do we write?

Dr Johnson had no doubts, or pretended to have none: ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. This is manifestly false, unless you make writing for some other reason one of your definitions of the word ‘blockhead’. In any case it’s not true of Johnson himself. Despite the indolence for which he [...]

Shock treatment

In 1971, Dr. Matthew Israel founded the Behavior Research Institute in Canton. Its name was later changed to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center to honor the jurist who upheld Israel’s controversial methods in court. At Harvard in the 1950s, Israel was a student of B. F. Skinner, founder of behavioral psychology and author of “Walden [...]

On the Phone!!!!!

On Saturday morning I had to catch the 7.40 from London to Manchester. The train was cancelled, leaving a lot of annoyed Manchester United fans swearing and threatening to headbutt the next Virgin train.
I hovered behind them while pretending to be foreign, so that if they tried to speak to me I could pretend I [...]