Title background
Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana will be contesting their World Championship match in London in November. As I mentioned last…
no. 509
Black to play. This is from Pillsbury-Lasker, St Petersburg 1895/96. Black has sacrificed two rooks for a bishop to drive the…
Royal treatment
In Competition No. 3051 you were invited to supply an entry by a well-known diarist describing the wedding day of…
2362: Men of note IV
The unclued lights are of a kind. Ignore all accents and diacritical marks throughout the puzzle. The fifth letter of…
to 2359: Down
The unclued lights can be preceded by BLUE which was hidden at the start of the third row and had…
How to cope with unsold tickets and empty halls: my advice to Owen Jones
My heart goes out to Owen Jones. The left-wing journalist is one of the headliners at a Labour party fund-raiser…
Why human nature means most economic models are doomed from the start
History records many well conceived and apparently logical grand plans for the betterment of mankind. Sadly such ideas almost always…
Farewell to a bottle and a half per day – I have finally embarked on a diet
Are there still travelling fairs? In many villages, they used to be part of the annual round. For weeks, the…
Unconscious bias: is Starbucks like the old Met Police?
Starbucks closed its 8,000 American coffee shops for half a day to give staff unconscious bias training. Training is to…
Simon Collins
Harry and Meghan’s big day was such a media roadblock in Australia that there were about fifteen hours when it…
Decline and fall
It’s official. Our decline into Third World status is accelerating. Our students languish behind those of Kazakhstan and Bulgaria in…
Latham’s law
What was Paul Ramsay thinking? In dedicating part of his estate’s $3 billion endowment to course work at an Australian…
At uni with Mrs Potato Head
These days, whenever a local council comes up with a lunatic idea that bewilders ordinary Australians, you can be guaranteed…
Brown study
It is hard to be original about the Joyce-Kardashian interview, but there are two points worth making. First, it was…
To Jerusalem and back
I land at Ben-Gurion Airport just before midnight and begin the long ascent to Jerusalem. The headiness hits me immediately…
Clash of teaching civilisations
In 1942 Dr Joseph Needham was sent by the British government to China to study China’s universities and see what…
Australian notes
On Republicanism The spectacle of so many grisly celebrities clustered together at the royal wedding reminded me why I was…
West goes south
Last November I was lucky enough to have been invited to the Sydney launch of the Ramsay Centre for Western…
Kororadika Beach by Augustus Earle
Antiquarians can seem an exotic group to many of us and yet there are several successful dealers in this country,…
White fright
In the freakish universe of identity politics, there’s no creature sadder than the self-hating white person. All it takes for…
Western Civ rules – OK!
According to the the Times Higher Education Supplement, there is only one Australian university in the world’s top fifty: the…
Deft diplomacy beats foreign aid
Two recent incidents have called into question the role of Australia’s foreign aid program. Indonesia raised eyebrows last week, after…
The great undiagnosed dysrationalia epidemic
I have long wondered why really intelligent people, like Malcolm Turnbull, say, and others, fail to see how irrational it…
Time to end the closed shop of ideas at university
Imagine, if you will, a parallel universe in which the ANU accredits the Ramsay Centre. The Centre produces a mission…
