I considered writing about presidential politics, but the way things are going lately, by the time you read this on Wednesday, we may well be on to a whole new storyline I can’t anticipate. So, I’m going to go off topic and reflect on a new paper by two economists about an early example of ...
This week’s dramatic events—Trump surviving being wounded by a would-be assassin quickly followed by his selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate—will focus attention on the newer generation of higher-brow rightist thinkers because it’s now thinkable that Vance, whose first ...
The U.S. total fertility rate briefly exceeded the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman’s lifetime during the Housing Bubble of 2006–2007 but has since dropped steadily, hitting a new record low of 1.62 in 2023. Total births fell 2 percent last year to under 3.6 million, the lowest total ...
If the mainstream media won’t tell you the truth about the President’s age-driven mental decline until forced to spill the beans by a debate on live TV, can you trust them not to try to mislead you about other things as well? No, of course not. Does that also mean that if they misdirect you ...
Something unexpected has been going on with suicide rates over the past half decade. First, though, some background: It is widely assumed by many people who don’t pay close attention to social science statistics that because African-American life is, as we are so often told, unbearably tragic, ...
When thuggishness damaged the appeal of the National Basketball Association around the turn of the century, the executive leadership eventually took successful steps to rein it in. Why haven’t NBA executives intervened in their Women’s NBA vanity project to protect their most valuable asset, ...
Because I’ve been on the road promoting my anthology Noticing, I decided to review Tucker Carlson’s anthology of his journalism, The Long Slide. Unlike with me, writing an article means that Tucker gets out of his house: I wrote magazine stories for decades, long after I went into television ...
In 2017 the pseudonymous blogger Spotted Toad appears to have coined the term “The Great Awokening” to denote the decade of identity politics mania that began about 2013. His joke was of course a pun upon the various Great Awakening religious revivals that periodically swept Protestant America ...
Until recently, I would have guessed I’d never get to do an old-fashioned book tour in my lifetime. After all, I didn’t make a single public appearance in more than a decade, from February 2013 until June 2023. I’d occasionally get invited to give speeches, then hear that the hotel had ...
In the most violent episode so far in the vastly publicized campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, at the end of April a goon squad of nationalist whites attacked the encampment of diverse UCLA students, while police stood back and let the militia whale on the pro-Palestinian demonstrators ...
