Whether or not you’ve ever taken a course in formal logic, you know what a syllogism is, and you doubtless use syllogisms all the time. The syllogism may be the simplest form of logical argument. It consists of two statements, or premises, and a conclusion that is drawn from the interaction of those statements.

People use the Missing Premise trick to lead their listeners into accepting conclusions that may or may not be strictly true but that they might be reluctant to accept if the entire argument were spelled out.

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Everyone needs a better class of garbage, the matter of one of Jason Robards’s many exhortations in the 1965 film A Thousand Clowns. The film nicely bookends Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man, and not just as an antonym…

There’s not much better than beans and cornbread—or spaghetti and meatballs, or lox and bagels. Foods know the virtue of cross-tribal elective affinities, even if so many people can barely tolerate their next-door neighbors, much less the folks who live down the lane or on the other side of the veld.

In “Beans and Cornbread,” the great Louis Jordan invites us to contemplate what happens when we trade asperity for amity.

Come inside for a spin of another Jordan hit, the incomparably great “Caldonia.”

The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 was among the strongest and most devastating natural disasters to befall the modern world. It shook Europe literally, but also spiritually. After all, why would God allow such a tragedy, especially one in which many of the victims were in church no less?

Pat Robertson, and others, have wondered the same question in relation to last week’s earthquake in Haiti.

A computer meltdown on a busy day full of overwork reminds me, after the usual emission of a blue cloud of profanity and impatience, both that a holiday season is fast approaching and that there are more important things than our quotidian worries to consider.

In that spirit, and in a time of endless war and violence, here are two versions of Cat Stevens/Yusuf’s hopeful hymn “Peace Train,” in reverse chronological order, the first world-seasoned (played here), the second youthfully exuberant (click through to the post for the latter).

Which version do you like best?

To live outside the law, says the poet, you must be honest. Two outlaws discovered this week that you’d better live outside caves, too.

Come along on a whirlwind tour of Antarctica, Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Reiner (the Shakespearean), and that great anthem of civilized life, the Addams Family theme song.

While on vacation last week, I had the pleasure of seeing a skillful performance of The Merchant of Venice.

I really had a hard time with Shylock.

Not so much personally—since I knew what to expect and fully understand the context in which Shakespeare derived the character, and how 16th-century England felt about usery and Jews—but how others in the audience perceived him, including my own children, who have been raised to quickly reject prejudice and stereotype wherever and however they arise.

I give you the “birthers,” so called.

This loud faction profess to know that President Obama was not born in the United States, as is required by the Constitution of a president, and therefore is in fact not the president.

Why do they think that they know this? That is a question for a mental health professional.

What might cause them to give up this idea? That’s a more interesting question.

Thirty years ago, in 1979, Milton Friedman—the Nobel Prize-winning economist and Britannica contributor who was born this day in 1912—famously “schooled” talk-show host Phil Donahue on the nature of greed and the virtues of capitalism.

Watch on …

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, though surely none of us has ever tried.

Just so, there’s more than one way to peel a banana, as this little video urges.

But should there be? We call on William of Ockham, that great medieval philosopher, for guidance.