One of the more peculiar ideological developments of the 21st century is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the conquering hero of the 20th-century center-left, has faded into vague disrepute among the very people who would have enthusiastically voted for him in his own day. It used to be that FDR ...
The growth of science denialism in the 21st century can be seen in the mainstream media’s gleeful reaction to the death at 97 of James D. Watson (1928–2025), codiscoverer of the structure of DNA. Supposedly, the age of cancel culture is over. But nobody in the prestige press is apologizing for ...
I was reading a new academic paper from the Journal of Political Economy titled “How Social Structure Drives Innovation: Surname Diversity and Patents in U.S. History” on how Diversity Was Our Strength in 1850–1940, and I was reminded once again that quantitative economists tend to lack much ...
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has been one of the English-speaking world’s leading public intellectuals for the past three decades. But rather than retire to full-time punditry, he’s continued to do psychological exploration, first at MIT and now Harvard. His thirteenth book, When Everyone ...
One Battle After Another is a brainless but fun action comedy by Paul Thomas Anderson, who has a penchant for coming up with bad titles for good movies, like his There Will Be Blood. Even in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, this slapdash tale of a gang of 1970s-style leftist terrorists ...
What have we learned since the murder of poor Charlie Kirk two weeks ago? First, it’s an open-and-shut case. Tyler Robinson’s own parents turned him in. Perhaps some other young creeps were involved, but, obviously, the assassination didn’t require a vast conspiracy utilizing the ...
The time is auspicious to deliver some major blows to America’s crime problem. It’s not that murder has been increasing lately—it’s been drifting downward at an accelerating rate since it shot up 30 percent during the last week in May 2020 when the liberal establishment declared a ...
Way back in the 1970s, I was fascinated by cosmology, the study of the origin of the universe. It had been discovered by Edwin Hubble in the 1920s at the Mt. Wilson observatory, which I can see from the end of my block, that the universe consists of uncounted numbers of separate galaxies, like ...
Is crime up or down in Washington, D.C.? That’s one of those eternal questions that’s back in the news this week as Donald Trump cracks down on crime in the capital city. From The New York Times’ news section: Live Update: Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s ...
