Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple is a retired doctor. He is contributing editor of the City Journal of New York and the author of 30 books, including “Life at the Bottom.” His latest book is “Embargo and Other Stories.”

Virtue Gone Mad: Manager Punished More Harshly Than the Shoplifter He Stopped

Commentary Friedrich Nietzsche thought that the decline of the Christian religion in Europe would inevitably lead to a ...

Viewpoints May 3, 2026
Europe’s Immigration Problem: People, Not Accounting Units

Commentary It is perfectly normal and healthy that in an electoral democracy a government should be voted out ...

Viewpoints April 16, 2026
Comfort Blinds Us to the Truth About Illegal Labor

Commentary The shooting to death of Alex Pretti in Minnesota resulted in a surprising inversion of opinion. Those ...

Viewpoints February 2, 2026
Delusion or Hate? Gaps Persist in Madness and Violence Cases

Commentary Reading the news from whatever source is often frustrating (quite apart from the fact that it is ...

Viewpoints November 30, 2025
In Culture Wars, Museums Become a Battleground

Commentary One of the epigraphs to the late Richard Pipes’s great book "The Russian Revolution" cites the Russian ...

Opinion August 29, 2025
Why We Should Still Call a Spade a Spade

Commentary Quite by chance, I came across an interesting article on the website of National Public Radio (NPR). ...

Opinion July 15, 2025
As Homelessness Grows, City Leaders Chase Global Goals

Commentary The mayors of large cities in the West these days seem often to be more concerned with ...

Viewpoints July 2, 2025
Discrimination by Design: The DEI Logic No One Wants to Face

Commentary One of the things that most surprises me about proponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as ...

Viewpoints April 17, 2025
Why Smashing Teslas Won’t Save the Planet—or Prove a Point

Commentary One of the characteristics of our age is both the intensity and the shallowness with which people ...

Viewpoints March 24, 2025
The Harsh Reality of Prostitution

Why prostitution can never be 'a glorious cycle of song,' as the Oscar-winning ‘Anora’ implies.

Viewpoints March 16, 2025
The Disturbing Rise of Criminal Idolatry in a Superficial Age

Commentary A portrait of Luigi Mangione has been painted on a wall in London under a brick arch ...

Opinion March 5, 2025
Rolling Back DEI: Resisting Forced Equality

Commentary Equality of opportunity is to modern political thought what deliciousness is to food: Everyone is for it, ...

Viewpoints January 30, 2025
Debating Biden’s Death Penalty Stance

Commentary President Joe Biden’s commutation of the death penalty for 37 federal prisoners was somewhat inconsistent. He said, ...

Viewpoints December 28, 2024
Moral Exhibitionism: The Hollow Virtue of Overreaction

Commentary Victory or defeat in democratic elections often provokes elation or misery, neither of which, for obvious reasons, ...

Viewpoints December 2, 2024
When Art Becomes a Target: The Troubling Defense of Vandalism

Commentary When the law, however reasonable it might be, is not respected by a significant part of the ...

Viewpoints October 1, 2024
Ethical Limits to the Pursuit of Knowledge

The Cass report called for a moratorium on the use of puberty-blocking drugs until more is known. But ...

Viewpoints September 3, 2024
Richard Glossip Execution Case: A Cat-and-Mouse Game With Justice

What kind of criminal justice system takes 27 years to decide if a man should die? What kind ...

Viewpoints May 6, 2024
Blaming Victims: San Francisco’s Irrational Grocery Store Proposal

In the case of grocery stores in San Francisco that close because the burden of crime is too ...

Viewpoints April 19, 2024
Is Reform Possible?

People in Britain and France should pay close attention to what is happening in Argentina, for it is ...

Viewpoints March 20, 2024
The Distrust of the Political Class

Deep mistrust of political elites is now widespread throughout the Western world, probably to an extent greater than ...

Viewpoints March 14, 2024
The Young Dictators

It seems to me that the younger generation of today is less attached to the notion of freedom ...

Viewpoints February 28, 2024
Equity’s Dangerous Echo

It's alarming that a way of thinking should now be in common between the Nazis and the Journal ...

Viewpoints February 22, 2024
A Victory for Academic Freedom but the War Can Still Be Lost

Any victory in the so-called culture wars is welcome, but no such victory is final or irreversible.

Viewpoints January 25, 2024
The Perils of Polypharmacy

The modern superstition is that for every human dissatisfaction, from that of aging skin to loneliness, there's an ...

Viewpoints January 5, 2024
Buyer Beware in the Celebrity Age

What are we to think of people who buy financial products because they're endorsed by a soccer star?

Viewpoints December 5, 2023
Chalk and Cheese: Different Reactions to Teen Deaths in France Reveal Underlying Tensions

The murder of a 16-year-old boy at a village party in rural France has revealed with stark clarity ...

Viewpoints November 28, 2023
Moral Grandiosity of Epic Proportions

Apart from the climate change protesters’ ineffable certainty and self-righteousness, what unites them is their moral grandiosity.

Viewpoints November 17, 2023