Have we just passed peak inflation? That was the question economists were debating last week, when the US Labor Department published the latest consumer price inflation rate. The index in June was 9.1% above the level a year before — the highest figure since December 1981. Is that the top? We…

The idea of time travel is an old British preoccupation, from H.G. Wells’s 1895 novel to the seemingly immortal television series “Doctor Who,” which first aired in 1963, the year before I was born. Although I didn’t travel by Tardis or encounter any murderous Daleks, returning to my native land…

W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel “The Painted Veil” features a harrowing description of a cholera outbreak in a provincial Chinese city. “The great city lay in terror; and death, sudden and ruthless, hurried through its tortuous streets … The people were dying at the rate of a hundred a day, and…

War is coming — a not-so-great northern war. Don’t be fooled by last Thursday’s conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Joe Biden, with its promise of further negotiations in January. When one party is bent on war, this kind of diplomatic activity…

Back in 2006, the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb risked a sketch in which they played two Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II. Reflecting on the Totenkopf (death’s head) badges on their caps, Mitchell asked the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?” An…

I have met Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg only once and it did not go well. It was at a dinner in July 2017, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, and controversy was raging about Facebook’s political role. I had the temerity to warn him that he increasingly…

“It never rains, but what it pours,” sang Judy Garland to Mickey Rooney in 1938, memorably describing what happens “if Lady Luck should happen to desert you.” You stub your toe, ouch, You hit your elbow, ooh, You bump your head, ooh. You step on a tack and you let out a howl. There’s soap…

“I just want my life back,” said the singer Britney Spears on Wednesday. In 2008, Ms. Spears’s father was granted a conservatorship over her because of concerns about her mental health. According to her testimony last week, the arrangement has been used to force her to go on tour, to undergo…

In “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez imagines an enduring love triangle between two passionate people — Florentino and Fermina — and a punctilious doctor, Juvenal Urbino, whom Fermina is persuaded by her father to marry. Trained as a physician in Paris, Dr. Urbino is a national…

The Covid-19 pandemic is not over, but it is already clear that Lord Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal, has won his 2017 bet with the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker that “bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six-month period starting no later than…