Damian Thompson

Here we go again. What effect do you think watching porn and video games have on young men? Yup, they rewire the brain. It's such a clumsy metaphor – the brain isn't 'wired' in any meaningful sense – that you'd think psychologists and neuroscientists would run a mile from it. Unless, of course they're Baroness Greenfield, who is a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. She was director of the Royal Institution until her post was abolished in 2010, 'amid claims that there was almost no other way to get rid of her' (thank you, Wikipedia).

I see my Spectator colleagues have beaten me to it and republished a 1989 profile of Richard West, one of the finest foreign correspondents of the 20th century, who has died aged 84. Never mind. I'm determined to write about him. Annoyingly, I couldn't find a single picture of him on Google (I borrowed the one above from his Telegraph obit). That wouldn't have bothered him in the least. Dick, almost uniquely among Fleet Street legends, wasn't an egomaniac. He waded into war zones out of intense curiosity, not for byline glory. He once told me that he was about to be shot to pieces in Vietnam and it occurred to him that the only publication with whom he had a contract at the time was The Listener, a long-defunct and rather genteel BBC periodical.

Cocaine addiction is a dreadful thing. I've seen it so many times: bright, once-pretty people with washed-out grey faces who can't think about anything else. Children, partners, careers – they can all go hang so long as the restaurant has a loo where you can do a quick line between courses, or you can nip outside to suck on a crack pipe. This how frantic it can get: If anyone has stopped to watch me go to the cash machine and withdraw stacks of bills, several times because of the $200 transaction limit, then head out to an idling van with tinted windows, and return minutes later with bulging pockets, it wouldn't take much imagination to understand what had just transpired.

I'm intrigued by this recent study suggesting that intellectual gifts and learning disabilities, far from lying on opposite ends of a spectrum of intelligence, sometimes go hand in hand. Intrigued, but not surprised. Very bright people can be odd – we all know that. The eccentric genius is one of the clichés of history and fiction. But it's rooted in observation. One thinks of wild-haired Oxford dons at high table, singing music hall songs in iambic pentameter while spraying their neighbours in Brown Windsor soup. Or the story of a distinguished academic banned from dining in his own college after – so legend has it – reinforcing his argument about the intellectual failings of women by exposing himself in front of horrified guests.

The subject of identical twins has been on my mind ever since I read a magnificently creepy thriller called Ice Twins by SK Treymayne – a pseudonym meant to sound like a woman, but it fact belonging to the novelist Sean Thomas. I read it because Thomas is in the new Spectator Life explaining how the pressures of the market push the writers of psychological thrillers towards female-sounding names – so he (sort of) turned into a woman to make Ice Twins a bestseller, which it duly became. The book is tightly plotted, meticulously researched and I urge you read it – but what grabbed my attention was the subject of that research: identical twins. Lydia and Kirstie are monozygotic twin seven-year-olds (i.e., produced by a single fertilised egg).

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have launched a wildly expensive campaign against e-cigarettes because... well, I can't really work out their logic, but the sickly aroma of liberal puritanism is unmistakeable. The medical arguments are risible. The Wall Street Journal reports: Print and radio ads starting Monday target e-cigarette users who continue to smoke traditional cigarettes. They depict an e-cigarette user named Kristy alongside a caption that reads: 'I started using e-cigarettes but kept smoking. Right up until my lung collapsed.' So it was vaping that caused Kirsty's lung to collapse, was it? Nope: it was smoking cigarettes. Of which she did less because she also vaped, but for reasons that aren't explained she kept on smoking.

[Update: On looking more closely at the list of priests, I'm astonished by some of the names I see there – clergy I wouldn't have described as conservatives, let alone traditionalists. It reinforces my sense that vast numbers of priests, however much they admire Pope Francis, are worried about the direction of this pontificate – or, rather, its lack of direction.] Cardinal Vincent Nichols has slapped down nearly 500 priests who signed a letter to the Catholic Herald expressing concern about the Synod on the Family this October, which is to debate sensitive questions of sexual morality.

I'll keep this brief, but can the BBC please replace Ed Stourton as presenter of Radio 4's Sunday programme? He is an old Amplefordian from one of the great recusant families who, like many elderly Catholic toffs, holds 'progressive' views on faith and morals (though not education – he sent his sons to Eton). Fair enough, but he might at least go through the motions of hiding his bias when addressing Catholic issues on his dreary programme. Stourton has a particular downer on Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth, one of only two non-Magic Circle bishops who slipped through Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor's net (the other is Mark Davies of Shrewsbury).

The weekend brought yet another warning by an American website about Ritalin. Addiction.org wants people to know about the dangers of the 'abuse' of the drug when it's taken OTHER THAN PRESCRIBED. The capital letters are theirs – but the quote marks around 'abuse' are mine because I think the distinction between using and abusing Ritalin is somewhat artificial. As, indeed, is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the condition for which an estimated two million children in the US receive the drug – named, I kid you not, after 'Rita', the wife of the chemist who concocted it.