In an August Takimag piece, Dr. Dalrymple sounds off on the latest round of punishments meted out to disgraced scientists for committing fraud during the course of their research.
There seems to be a lot of this about, but presumably it is only a tiny proportion of all scientific activity. Or is it because, if punishment of scientific fraud were more severe, scientific activity itself would grind to a halt?
To mark the release of the new Saving the Planet and Other Stories audiobook, we’re giving away a limited number of promo codes for other Theodore Dalrymple audiobooks on Audible. The available titles are:
Using the promo codes, you can get a free copy of any of these audiobooks. We only ask that you consider buying Saving the Planet and Other Stories, and leave a review on Audible of any books for which you’re given a promo code.
If you’d like to take advantage of this offer, just contact us here at The Skeptical Doctor, letting us know the titles in which you’re interested and your preferred Audible “marketplace” (only US and UK codes are made available).
We’re pleased to be able to announce that Dalrymple’s Saving the Planet and Other Stories has just been released as an audiobook at Amazon and Audible!
Somewhat in the tradition of Chekhov, these imaginative short stories are by turns bleak and comical, and all demonstrate the usual penetrating Dalrymplian insight into the human condition.
There are eight stories, narrated by long-time friend of this site, Gavin Orland, these being:
Please feel free to review this title at Amazon or Audible, and let us know in the comments here of any other works which you would particularly like to be made available in this format.
In the September edition of New English Review, the critical doctor covers the shocking revelation that Nobel Prize-winning writer Alice Munro had turned a blind eye to the persistent sexual abuse of her daughter by her second husband.
To suppose that Alice believed she was simply a product of her cultural circumstances—she the author of many books and the recipient of a Nobel Prize! —is simply preposterous: but if it were true, it would mean that she was not a fully adult member of the human race, responsible for what she did or failed to do.
In the September issue of New Criterion, the skeptical doctor reviews a new book by the French philosopher and commentator Pascal Bruckner on the post-COVID self-confinement of an increasing number of Westerners.
Please note that this essay is currently behind a paywall.
Pascal Bruckner is a French philosopher and social commentator who has long challenged—made a career of challenging—la pensée unique, that tendency of intellectuals in particular to suppose that their understanding of the world, usually antinomian, is the only such understanding that an intelligent, educated, well-informed, and moral person can have, to the point that dissent from it is both stupid and malevolent.
Over at City Journal, our bibliophile doctor ruminates on a rare E.M. Forster sci-fi story, which eerily foreshadowed some aspects of our present-day technological dystopia.
One does not normally associate E. M. Forster with science fiction: he is considered more a chronicler of the etiolated emotional life of the English upper-middle classes of the Edwardian era. But his one foray into science fiction seemed to foreshadow exactly the kind of scenes that followed last month’s brief disruption to 3 million computers worldwide by the intrusion of a faulty new update into Microsoft programs.
In this week’s Takimag, our authentic doctor calls out President Macron’s awkward and undignified public embrace of a rather large judo Olympic medalist.
I confess that I am in general against all this hugging in public, which is so often a means of displaying insincerity, but on this occasion especially a simple handshake would have been far better. This was so obvious that one asks how a man as intelligent as the president of France could not, or at least did not, see it.
In his Takimag column last week, our favorite doctor describes observing the life and death struggle of a bee caught in a spider web in the French countryside.
But the world is not a vast morality play. Over-moralizing it is as foolish as under-moralizing it. There is no alternative to judgment.
In the current issue of The Critic, the doubtful doctor gets irritated reading an English newspaper’s dishonest and fearful coverage of a pro-Palestinian group’s attack on Barclays.
I think there is a menace somewhere in the country, but I could not positively say where or what it is. Perhaps it is everywhere.