In this week’s Takimag column, Dr. Dalrymple takes up the topic of the use and abuse of arsenic in real life and in literature since the 19th-century.

I suspect that nowadays people might be shocked by this irony and believe that it indicated a callousness on the part of the author, as if he really thought that poisoning was fun or funny. We are now terribly literal-minded, too much so for irony. If we are infinitely more technically sophisticated than our near ancestors, mentally we are much less so.

Our favorite doctor examines the massively pressing problem of obesity, and the British government’s recent proposal to address this burgeoning issue, in his The Epoch Times column.

On the other hand, most people think, with varying degrees of reticence to express their thoughts in public, that obesity is the consequence of weakness of will. Greed is not illness but a sin, or at least a moral failure. We are fat because we give into temptation, that which Oscar Wilde said was the only thing that he could not resist.

Over at The Critic, the good doctor considers some questionable words used for prisons after hearing about an execution carried out in the American state of Indiana.

But it could hardly be severe punishment unless executions were at least sometimes carried out, otherwise it would be known in advance that death row was not really death row.

Over at The Epoch Times, the dubious doctor reflects on the bizarre and vacuous modern celebrity phenomenon after hearing about someone formerly famous called Britney Spears.

Many people would rather be known for something outrageous than not be known at all: for them, a few minutes of fame or notoriety justify or validate an entire life. They are therefore more than willing to exhibit themselves to the world: they are eager to do so.

Once again at The European Conservative, the critical doctor contemplates the decayed state of Western music after reading a book about the Bataclan terrorist attack written by one of the survivors.

The second explanation is that the Western artistic tradition (in practically all fields) is exhausted, modernism having been both a symptom and a cause of that exhaustion. The kind of performance given by the EODM is a substitute—or desperate search for—originality, the romantic cult of the latter having been reinforced by our cult of individualism.

Theodore Dalrymple makes his triumphant return to the relaunched The European Conservative with an essay on his observations during a taxi cab ride through the mess that modern-day Paris has become.

This brings me by natural progression to the current mayor of Paris, Ms. Anne Hidalgo, and her effect on the environment, which is incomparably worse than that of the demonstrators whose mess could at least be easily cleared up, albeit that it still signified a complete absence of civic sense or virtue.

In this week’s Takimag column, the skeptical doctor comments on a Russian book that he recently picked up in France about a fictional plague set in Stalin’s USSR.

Many of us must have wondered whether the virus or the human response to it has done more harm (I leave aside the question of its origins). I think people probably have stronger opinions on this subject than perhaps are justified by the well-foundedness of their opinions. For every piece of evidence there seems to be a counter-piece of evidence. As so often, the best lack all conviction (even when, for political or practical reasons, they have to pretend to have it), while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Dr. Dalrymple touts the success of the British Covid-19 vaccination program over at Law & Liberty. I am eagerly awaiting the deluge of reader responses to this essay, especially from our British readers.

The one undoubted human triumph of the pandemic so far is the development of vaccines in record time. The three main vaccines seem to be both safe and effective—unless, as believed by some, there is a giant conspiracy to deceive the people of the world.

The good doctor thinks back to his many trips to Haiti in his The Epoch Times column after hearing of the assassination of the country’s president.

Yet the travails of Haiti were far from over. Apart from what, in the context, one might call the normal political disasters that have attended its history ever since in won its independence from France in 1804, there was a devastating earthquake followed by a cholera epidemic and a hurricane of terrible proportions.