In the winter edition of City Journal, our dubious doctor reviews Boris Johnson’s subpar memoir, which he purchased surreptitiously lest someone spot him with this unpopular book.

Boris writes breezily, and often with a near-adolescent facetiousness that either amuses or irritates. His intellectual seriousness, as against his evident intellectual capacity, has always divided observers—whether, deep in his soufflé of lightheartedness, there lies a suet pudding of gravitas trying to get out. Is his apparent frivolity a mask covering a deep, sincerely held, political philosophy?

Our favorite doctor covers the negative and often preposterous reactions to the new black leader of Britain’s Conservative Party over at City Journal.

This notion echoes Marxist epistemology and moral psychology, where intellectual allegiance is determined not by economic class but by race. To be truly black, one must think and act in a prescribed manner; authentic blackness entails ideological uniformity.

Back at Takimag, our grateful doctor reflects on his fortunate life while recollecting meetings with survivors of World War II POW camps.

Of late, I have thought of what I should like my epitaph to be: perhaps “He was not a nuisance.”

In his latest Epoch Times piece, our upstanding doctor lambastes an Oscar-winning film that attempts to glamorize the ‘oldest profession in the world.’

Censoriousness can easily translate into cruelty, which is no doubt why some people (in medical journals, for example) insist on renaming prostitution as “sex-work” and prostitutes as “sex-workers.” No one has yet done the same for pimps, however; they have not yet become “sex-work managers” in the mealy-mouths of those who employ the new euphemisms.

In his latest Takimag column, our nostalgic doctor reminisces about his youthful days as an English football fan after reading an article on the great Lionel Messi.

No doubt it is a sign of my gradual change of species from human being to dinosaur that I think it was a more civilized world (at least in some respects) then than it is now, one in which our scale of values was better, but I am glad to think that even now Lionel Messi shares it, even if The Washington Post does not.

Over at The Oldie, Dr. Dalrymple considers the danger posed by elderly drivers after reading a dubious Canadian study.

There is undoubtedly a tendency in modern society not to lift restrictions when they cease to be necessary, either because the risk has disappeared or because it never really existed in the first place.

The March issue of The Critic contains a piece by our skeptical doctor opining on the general mental state of the British populace.

But it is surely significant that authors and journals think that adding the phrase “It’s official” to a dubious statement strengthens its verisimilitude in the minds of their readers, who they assume cannot judge for themselves.

Those who do not exercise their judgement soon will have none.

Over at Law & Liberty, Dr. Dalrymple delves into the topic of scientific fraud and its apparent upswing in our postmodern age.

In the fight against dishonesty in scientific research, as in the fight against bad ideas, there is no final victory. An interesting question is why some, but not all, fraudulent ideas persist, despite exposure.

In his Takimag column, our film critic doctor castigates a new Hollywood movie that glorifies the abhorrent and awful Brutalist architecture.

Pretentiousness is almost as unpleasing as outright stupidity. I left the cinema with a relief similar to that which I feel after a visit to the dentist.