In the May issue of New English Review, the curious doctor sits on his terrace in the French countryside and considers why he rarely sees dead birds, never smells the odor of dead rats in Paris, and why the sound of owls in the night comforts him.

I think I could easily become a nature mystic. The sound of owls at night—the call and its answer—soothes me, not being a mouse or a small mammal. When I hear the cuckoo I experience a sense of joy, though I know it is a bad bird and its vocal repertoire is less even than that of a rap singer.

In his weekly Takimag column, the good doctor laments the dilution of academic standards in the humanities after reading some particularly nonsensical verbiage from the keynote speaker of a conference of art historians in London.

Pretentious teachers teach pretension to new generations, who must then be found occupation to flatter their pretensions. Thus, the process is self-reinforcing and self-reproducing like a colony of bacteria in a petri dish. The only thing that will halt the expansion is the irruption of reality, for among other things, the pretension is always reality-denying.

In his Law & Liberty column, Theodore Dalrymple blasts the unfortunate, but all too predictable, spread of the woke mind virus to a formerly renowned book publisher.

I have long thought that the Soviet Union won the Cold War in the cultural and intellectual sphere, and the very form of language that the chief executive of PRH employs, to say nothing of its content, makes that assessment plausible. The worst is that the new totalitarianism is not imposed by a dictatorship, it is freely chosen. Such totalitarianism is the opportunity and salvation of ambitious mediocrities.

Back at The Oldie, our incredulous doctor calls into question an unscientific study concerning the positive health effects of art on the elderly enjoying their forced COVID lockdowns in Montreal.

Do we really need the BMJ to inform us that art improves life? Imagine a world in which there was no art and no possibility of there being any art: would anyone not understand that life in such a world would be deeply impoverished?

In this week’s Takimag column, Dr. Dalrymple goes after the omnipresent modern mental health industry as well as the climate alarmists who maliciously inflict unnecessary anxiety on children and teenagers. For proof, please see Greta Thurnberg. QED.

If I believed in conspiracies, I would say that those who indoctrinate children about the imminent end of the world because of climate change are in the pay of the monstrous regiment of mental health workers, who require a timid, shallow, anxiety-ridden population in order to guarantee their future income by promising to restore it to that mirage-like entity, mental health.

Over at The Epoch Times, our favorite doctor takes issue with President Biden’s bogus attachment to his Irish roots, which is done mainly for shallow and self-serving political purposes.

It was his character, not his origins, that counted, and this ought to be so in all elections. Those candidates who sentimentally recall their origins, near or distant, are appealing to the most primitive of allegiances and the worst of criteria for making a choice between rivals for office. No doubt this is to an extent inevitable, because it appeals to human nature rather than to human reason, but it should nevertheless count as a mark against them. We sometimes have to resist what comes most naturally to us.

Over at Quadrant, our critical doctor calls out the hypocritical and self-righteous protesters of the annual Australia Day celebration.

Looking recently at a picture of a demonstration against the celebration of Australia Day, I could not help but notice a person of Aboriginal descent dressed in that traditional item of costume, the T-shirt, employing that equally traditional instrument, the megaphone.

Our dubious doctor reflects on the mass protests and rioting in France over the raising of the retirement age by presidential diktat in this week’s Takimag article.

Civilization is a veneer, it is often said, as is the facing of a building. But the facing of a building is what can make the difference between a beautiful and a hideous construction. The cult of authenticity, or truth to materials and underlying structure, that has been assiduously promoted by driveling modern architectural theorists has led to the visual nightmare that is most modern cities. Destruction is always authentic, because it appeals to a kind of joy that is waiting patiently to emerge from every human breast, or at least from many of them.

In the April issue of The Critic, the skeptical doctor critiques a provocatively worded Daily Telegraph headline relating to the appointment of the new UK Netflix content commissar.

The consequence of persuading people that others decide for them is that they are provided in advance with an excuse for their own bad choices, because they come to believe that they make no choices at all.