Theodore Dalrymple admits that he’s a huge snob about sports fans. It’s not sport itself, but rather the fans who care inordinately about something blindingly trivial. Here he is decrying the French (he lives in France, a British expat) for going to pieces over the abject and shameful failure of their national soccer team in…

Just got a call from a friend from down South who’s vacationing with his family in Quebec City. He said he’d read my report about the incivility at the Fourth of July event in downtown Philadelphia, and couldn’t help contrasting it with what he’s seeing at public parks and suchlike in Quebec. He says the…

Netherlands beats Uruguay to go to the World Cup final on Sunday! Everybody sing the Dutch fight song:I love that song. It’s so very Dutch. It’s cheerful in an oom-pah-pah way, and the odd lyrics basically say not “let’s slaughter our opponents,” but rather, “let’s make a good showing, lads” — and in a charming…

From New York magazine’s profile of David Brooks: Brooks’s favorite social-science study is known as the Marshmallow Experiment. A child is left in a room with a marshmallow for fifteen minutes. If he restrains himself from eating the marshmallow, he gets a second one. If not, he doesn’t. The test turns out to be a…

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