Over at Takimag, our dubious doctor receives an email with unsolicited advice and bogus concern from his insurance company, which gets him thinking…

It is rather that such constant surveillance tends to undermine the distinction between what is properly public and properly private, to the detriment of the latter and the expansion of the former. Where everything is recorded (and we are increasingly complicit in this), we become performers rather than characters, and the boundary between the real and the bogus is extinguished.

In his Quadrant column, the skeptical doctor expertly sums up the woeful Parisian Olympic farce in not one but two scintillating essays.

Still, there is little doubt that Paris has not been beautified by its vainglorious and completely unnecessary decision to host the Olympics. It is true that the security situation in the world has deteriorated unpredictably since the decision to apply was taken; but the horrible physical mess that has resulted, the City of Light becoming the City of Concrete, was all too predictable, and the harm done to a unique place is much more important than the pleasure, which could have been taken anywhere in the world.

In his latest Law & Liberty essay, Prof. Dalrymple warns of the ongoing dangers of the infantilization of the British populace, which has gone hand in hand with the unhealthy growth in the popularity of psychology at universities.

But the very idea that reading about something unpleasant, even knowingly and without compulsion, can lead to such severe psychological reaction that professional assistance is necessary to overcome it is peculiarly demeaning of human beings and comparatively recent, occurring pari passu with the growth of clinical psychology as study and profession.

In last week’s Takimag, our ornithological doctor marvels at a friend’s phone app that can assign bird sounds to the correct species of bird.

They would surely soon learn respect for knowledge and lose some of their exhibitionist disillusionment before they ever had any illusions. Pseudosophistication is a great temptation for, and enemy of, the young.

Over at The Epoch Times, our distressed doctor covers the fallout from the Cass report, which is a recently published inquiry into medical services for ‘transgender’ patients in Britain.

In essence, the Cass report found that there was little good evidence to support the treatments that supposedly transgender children and adolescents were receiving. Even the natural history or evolution of the condition was not known.

In an August Takimag piece, Dr. Dalrymple sounds off on the latest round of punishments meted out to disgraced scientists for committing fraud during the course of their research.

There seems to be a lot of this about, but presumably it is only a tiny proportion of all scientific activity. Or is it because, if punishment of scientific fraud were more severe, scientific activity itself would grind to a halt?

In the September edition of New English Review, the critical doctor covers the shocking revelation that Nobel Prize-winning writer Alice Munro had turned a blind eye to the persistent sexual abuse of her daughter by her second husband.

To suppose that Alice believed she was simply a product of her cultural circumstances—she the author of many books and the recipient of a Nobel Prize! —is simply preposterous: but if it were true, it would mean that she was not a fully adult member of the human race, responsible for what she did or failed to do.

In the September issue of New Criterion, the skeptical doctor reviews a new book by the French philosopher and commentator Pascal Bruckner on the post-COVID self-confinement of an increasing number of Westerners.

Please note that this essay is currently behind a paywall.

Pascal Bruckner is a French philosopher and social commentator who has long challenged—made a career of challenging—la pensée unique, that tendency of intellectuals in particular to suppose that their understanding of the world, usually antinomian, is the only such understanding that an intelligent, educated, well-informed, and moral person can have, to the point that dissent from it is both stupid and malevolent.

Over at City Journal, our bibliophile doctor ruminates on a rare E.M. Forster sci-fi story, which eerily foreshadowed some aspects of our present-day technological dystopia.

One does not normally associate E. M. Forster with science fiction: he is considered more a chronicler of the etiolated emotional life of the English upper-middle classes of the Edwardian era. But his one foray into science fiction seemed to foreshadow exactly the kind of scenes that followed last month’s brief disruption to 3 million computers worldwide by the intrusion of a faulty new update into Microsoft programs.