Chohan Rajpoots, Delhi. Circa 1868

Caste Away

India is in the spotlight as it throws the G20 economic conference. Its host, Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi, is fooling around, Elon Musk-style, with the idea of changing the name of his country to “Bharat” as an anti-colonial gesture. And the California legislature has, after ...

America’s Untouchables

In this decade, America’s most effective conservative activist has likely been Chris Rufo, who in 2020 came up with a winning euphemism for all the racist antiwhite hate suffusing our schools, streets, and screens during the racial reckoning: “Critical Race Theory,” Rufo called ...

Whatever You Can Get Away With

Theoretically, you could become a professor of ethnic studies without being the ethnicity you study, just as you can be a gerontologist without being old or a botanist without being a plant. Still, and while I don’t often offer career advice, trust me on this: Don’t try it. The pervasiveness ...

Broken Window of Opportunity

Many people have strong opinions on what’s the best place to live: city, suburb, or country? Yet, personally, I’ve enjoyed every place I’ve lived and would like to see each kind thrive. Hence, I’ve been vocally critical about the American establishment letting our big cities decay into ...

Thin Man

In director Christopher Nolan’s campaign to save moviegoing from technological and social obsolescence, his latest ploy is his most clever yet: to lure grown-ups with three-digit IQs to see his Oppenheimer in numbers that had no longer seemed attainable in the 2020s by making his film outstanding ...

In a Barbie World

One of the most fervently held dogmas of the 1969 wave of feminism was that the only reason boys and girls liked different toys was due to sexist socialization. I was young in the early 1970s when androgynous “unisex” fashions were all the rage even in the Sears catalogs, but even then I was ...

The Victim Sweepstakes

Signed a third of a century ago by George H.W. Bush, the landmark 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act remains an illuminating example of the curious ways in which politics and policy tend to operate in modern America. The central aspect of the ADA is that it’s a civil rights law, modeled on the ...

Kids These Days

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State, has been sounding the alarm for years that the mental health of American young people is falling apart under the influence of smartphones and social media. She’s bulwarked her case impressively in her 2023 book Generations: The Real ...

Does Diversity Equal Adversity?

Now that the Supreme Court has finally ruled that affirmative action in college admissions violates the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws” clause, what will the Establishment come up with next to put its thumb on the scale in favor of blacks? One word that you’ll be hearing is ...

Class and Family

One of the more fascinating scholarly oeuvres of the 21st century is economic historian Gregory Clark’s planned trilogy of books with bad Hemingway puns for titles. In 2007 came Clark’s speculations on the causes of the Industrial Revolution, A Farewell to Alms, with its immodest subtitle, A ...