The Ironist

If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, it makes Jill pretty boring, too. If truth be told, those workaholics Mr. and Mrs. Jack are tedious company, as well. So obsessed has our society become with work, usually paid work, that its antithesis, play, has become...

The Russian writer, dissident, and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1917-2008) was an outspoken critic of communism in what was then called the Soviet Union, and was imprisoned in the Siberian gulag for eight years for critical comments he...

On First Looking into Perry’s Podcast Much have I travell’d on the internet, And many goodly vids and jpegs seen; Round many reels & tik toks have I been Which bards in fealty to Osiris hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Horus ruled as...

Stopping the Creeping Cancer under Wokeism Henry Goulburn, PC, one of the British negotiators at the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 (which ended America’s illegal attempt to seize Canada), remarked: I had no idea of the fixed determination which there is in the heart of...

{In keeping with our tradition of welcoming a variety of perspectives on everyday life, we at The Ironist are open to submissions of matters relating to public interest raised by aggrieved contrarians. We recently received the following from an anonymous contributor....

It’s as clear as mud.” Since mud is not clear, the speaker cannot mean what he says. (Let us assume he is male). In fact, he means that what he has heard or read is unclear. Very unclear.

The modern world has suffered in the past century, and into the present one, from the tyranny of monomaniacs, from murdering monsters of depravity like Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao, to cultural purists infected with the arrogance of privilege, like Trump and...

Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias uses the Greek name for Ramesses II, the most famous of Egyptian pharaohs, and was written as a great statute of him was in transit to the British Museum in a wave of awe and Orientalism sweeping Europe.

Children like to play in mud. It is (or was, for us ‘oldies’), a relatively rare treat to be able to play in the mud.  It is slippery, fun, sticky, squishable, slimy, and well, just fun to mess around with wet dirt.