In his weekly Takimag column, our worldly doctor opens up The Japan Times and is confronted with disturbing news stories that conflict with his clichés of Japan.

At any rate, the article hints at (though does not prove the existence of) a society in which radical social isolation and loneliness are common and, as other statistics quoted suggest, are becoming more common. No wonder the Japanese have so few children.

Back at Takimag, the skeptical doctor takes the disgraced and dishonest former Harvard president behind the woodshed and gives her what she desperately deserves.

What the world does not need, and what it needs not to have, is ambitious or evangelical mediocrities. What political correctness and wokeness have done is to give such types their chance to accumulate power, position, influence, and wealth. Such people are inclined not merely to obstruct people more gifted than themselves, but to fear and hate them. Thus, they are ever on the lookout for pretexts to destroy them.

Over at The Epoch Times—that bastion of Falun Gong intellectual thought—our concerned doctor laments the passing of the American actor Matthew Perry and ruminates on his excessive reliance on the pharmaceutical industry’s products.

However, we’re still inclined to believe that with advances in science and technology, we can live a life of permanent satisfaction and even happiness. Therefore, we medicalize their opposite, as if the natural state of mankind were perpetual bliss, deviations from which were a pathology that called for medical intervention.

In the first Takimag article of 2024, Dr. Dalrymple lambastes the spineless, politically correct JAMA while mocking the publication of yet another ineffectual and mostly meaningless medical research paper. New year, same old Dalrymple…

Could that pregnant person possibly be a woman? Heaven forfend that so prejudiced a thought should occur to us! If it occurred to you, dear reader, I suggest that your brain still needs washing. The word woman is here abjured by JAMA as completely as, say, it would abjure (rightly) the word bitch with reference to a woman. In other words, the word woman is now treated as if it were in itself an insult, a rather strange result of pro-feminist indoctrination.

Happy New Year to one and all! In the January issue of New English Review, our favorite doctor contemplates death, expanding his vast library, the gambling habits of his uncle (the best man he ever knew), and the value of playing the lottery.

But in the face of the inevitability of death, what hope is not illusory, or at least not of fleeting duration? And yet, who would, or can, live without hope? Better a false hope than a realistic despair. La Rochefoucauld said that we can stare for long neither at the sun nor death; T.S. Eliot said that humankind cannot stand very much reality. Illusion is essential to human existence.

In this week’s Takimag column, our playful doctor admits to taking delight in the Harvard University president’s plagiarism kerfuffle while scolding the modern bureaucratic state’s ever-expanding power.

The more cowed people are by regulations of their speech and conduct, the more microaggressions remain to be discovered and adjudicated. The task of securing diversity, equity, and inclusion is like the task of Sisyphus, with this difference: that in its very impossibility lies an assurance of a job, a pension, and a gratifying sense of doing the world’s work.

In the January issue of New Criterion, the dubious doctor takes aim at his two long-time bête noires: tattoos and modernist architecture.

Sometimes I think (or is it feel?) that we are living in a propaganda state, not like that of North Korea, of course, in which the source of a univocal doctrine is clear and unmistakable, but one in which we are constantly under bombardment by an opinion-forming class that wants to make us believe, or be enthusiastic about, something to which we were previously indifferent or even hostile. There is no identifiable single source of the propaganda, and yet there seems also to be coordination: for how else to explain its sudden ubiquity?

In his latest Takimag article, Theodore Dalrymple recounts lying in bed one morning, absorbed in an Agatha Christie mystery, as he battles a persistently obnoxious fly.

In fact, a publisher once asked me to write a book about Mrs. Christie’s philosophical, social, and psychological ideas. The prospect tempted me because I could lie abed all day reading her and imagine that I was working. I also had a grand theory to propound, namely that Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were actually themselves serial killers.