In the June issue of New Criterion, our cultured doctor travels to Birmingham with his wife to see an exhibition of Carlo Crivelli’s paintings, comes face-to-face once again with the city’s awful modernist architecture and the decaying English culture, but finishes the day on a high note at an old-school Indian restaurant.

The magnificent Victorian library, so expressive of municipal pride and ambition for the city’s population, was demolished in 1970, in the midst of the frenzy of anti-Victorianism—the revenge of contemporary nullities on past people of substance—to make way for an inverted concrete ziggurat of quite exemplary ugliness.

Over at City Journal, Dr. Dalrymple weighs in on the troubling expansion of the already unsettling Canadian law on doctor-assisted suicide to now include those who are psychiatrically ill.

Given that severe psychiatric disorder tends to cloud the judgment of those who suffer from it, one wonders who will benefit most from this law, if passed. Certainly, it might remove from society people who are often difficult, unproductive, and expensive for others. They might be encouraged to shuffle off this mortal coil as a service to their relatives or even to their county. The distinction between the voluntary and the compulsory might become blurred.

In his weekly Takimag column, the dissenting doctor calls out the bloated, bureaucratic nanny state ready to intervene on behalf of the helpless, victimized sheep whose rights it claims to champion.

The more vulnerable people can be induced to believe themselves to be, the more they need assistance to keep themselves going. Such assistance (which is self-justifying, though never sufficient, or indeed even partially effective) requires a vast legal and other infrastructure, put in place and regulated by the government. The government is the pastor, the people are the sheep.

Our levelheaded doctor considers our overly fearful world filled with manufactured anxiety of one looming calamity or another over at The Epoch Times.

Yes, we never lack for reasons for anxiety, which it is our duty as citizens to feel even if anxiety is an unpleasant feeling and by feeling it we improve nothing and affect nothing. Our watchword is not eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die, but eat, drink, and be anxious for tomorrow we die.

Over at Law & Liberty, Theodore Dalrymple opines on the upright bearing of the world-famous tennis champion, Boris Becker, during his sentencing to prison for not revealing all of his assets during bankruptcy proceedings.

In not expressing remorse, Becker displayed a kind of probity. Either he did not feel it, in which case it would have been dishonest to have expressed it, or he did feel some remorse but refused to express it in order merely to obtain a reduction in his sentence. In either case, he showed himself in a certain respect the superior of his judge.

In this week’s Takimag, the good doctor turns his gaze toward the irresponsible and profligate monetary and fiscal policies pursued by most Western governments seeking to square that proverbial circle in an attempt to win the next election.

For many years, the policy of several Western governments has been, by various subterfuges, to live beyond their means, to spread largesse they do not have, to put off the reckoning to another day, to deceive the electorate into thinking that what cannot continue will nevertheless continue, and moreover continue forever.

In the May print edition of First Things, our favorite doctor turns literary critic as he reviews the latest book by the ever interesting Michel Houellebecq, titled Anéantir (Annihilation).

As Chekhov conveyed boredom without being boring, so Michel Houellebecq conveys meaninglessness without being meaningless. Indeed, his particular subject is the spiritual, intellectual, and political vacuity of life in a modern consumer ­society—France in this case, but it could be any Western country. One gets the point early on in his oeuvre, but his observations are so acute and pointed that his variations on the theme are always worth reading. Houellebecq reveals the absurdity that often lurks behind the ­commonplace.

In the April edition of First Things, the perceptive doctor summarizes for us the recent French presidential election and the possible consequences it may carry for the next one.

Narrow constitutional legitimacy without the wider kind is now a problem for many Western democracies. In France, however, there is a further problem, and successive presidents have wrestled with it in vain. People dislike their state but expect everything of it. They want its benefits and protections but hate taxes. They want reform but no change.

In this week’s Takimag column, Dr. Dalrymple considers the obesity epidemic while remembering his first and only “epic” breakfast, which took place while visiting a prominent Dagestani Islamist with a penchant for Armenian brandy.

One thing I have noticed: Obese people can be almost evangelistic for obesity, as if to justify themselves. If everyone is obese (or many people are), no one is obese, and individual responsibility is thereby abrogated. Fat people tend to have fat dogs, at least on my straw poll. We live in a world that is becoming like that of a painting by Fernando Botero, with the humor taken out.