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.

Over at City Journal, our perturbed doctor explains the chaos and disorder currently reigning in English cities by referencing the premise of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

I confess that when I look at the people rioting, the youngish men, I feel almost as if they were of a different species from myself. They seem brutish, their faces bone and bristle. Their ugliness, however, is not biological or hereditary; it is an ugliness of soul, an antinomian ugliness.

In last week’s Takimag column, Theodore Dalrymple continues his merciless critique of the shamelessly ‘woke’ and utterly disordered Summer Olympic Games in Paris.

But the desire not to offend, laudable as it is, cannot require people to twist their minds to accommodate obvious falsehoods and repeat them as if they were true.