Like the uninspired sermon-writer who finds a way to link everything to Jesus, some commentators find a way to link everything to climate change. In December, an editorial in The Lancet medical journal on Covid-19 and climate change announced that “the causes of both...
“What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism is inspiring — although as anyone suffering from long Covid can tell you, it is not always true. Sometimes what does not kill you just makes you weaker. Does Nietzsche’s maxim apply...
Why parents, politicians and doctors would be wiser to sometimes do nothing. Lady Sale (played by Helena Bonham Carter) was part of a bloody and ignominious British retreat from Afghanistan in 1842. The arrogant colonial invaders had thought intervening in Afghan...
Wrinkles and grey hairs notwithstanding, I must be younger than I had assumed. Sixty per cent of the adult population of the UK have been vaccinated with at least one dose, but your columnist is not old enough to be one of them. Who knew? This means I still have...
We are now about a year into the ohmygosh-this-is-for-real stage of the pandemic. A time, perhaps, for taking stock of the big decisions — and whether they were wise. To my mind, there were two big calls to be made. The first: was this virus a deadly enough threat to...
Has the economic clock started to run backwards? The defining fact of economic history is that, over time, humans have been able to produce vastly more of whatever goods and services they value. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith had no doubts that the foundation of...
In 1928, Karl Jansky, a young radio engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, began researching static interference that might obscure voice transmissions. Five years later, after building a large rotating antenna and investigating every possibility he could think of,...
It isn’t often I receive an email that makes me smoulder with rage. This one did, which was strange since it was perfectly polite. My correspondent wanted to know why he wasn’t allowed to meet his friends indoors for coffee. They were in their early seventies and...
In 1935, officials in the British Air Ministry were trying to figure out whether it was possible to shoot down enemy aircraft with a death ray. Reader, they did not succeed. Fortunately, the effort spawned something much more useful. Robert Watson-Watt and Arnold...