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 ...

I’m not much of a traveler, so my recent trip to North Central Europe for a conference was my first visit to the mother continent since a single day in Istanbul in 2009. I’d never been to that part of Europe before, so I stuck to the obvious destinations: Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Krakow, and ...

Here’s a speech I gave in Germany at an annual conference of European conservative philosophers. It’s not a secret symposium, but these days it’s best to keep a low profile. I’m not sure what the assembled sages, who mostly reason from what Socrates said to Phaedo, thought about my ...

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government geared up to fight a long, twilight struggle to root out Jim Crow, starting numberless government agencies to combat discrimination, such as the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. But, deprived of government support, Jim Crow ...

I’ve read numberless op-eds in recent years lamenting conservative distrust of scientific experts. Yet, progressives are remarkably anti-expert when it comes to the venerable field of research into human intelligence. IQ psychometrics emerged as a scientific field of study in the first decade of ...

Genealogy is a popular hobby, but the concept of the family tree has attracted remarkably little highbrow thinking in recent centuries. Yet, the family tree is one of the most philosophically interesting entities imaginable. It seems hypothetical, like something Plato might have dreamed up. And ...

In the five years after the demise of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, what did we learn from the racial reckoning? I guess we learned not to do it again. Or so I hope. Hence, let’s take a look at the data on the issue that was said to be the cause of the storm: Is there racial bias in police ...

A number of own goals by the Trump administration led to Democratic resistance finally stiffening in April. Yet Trump’s impressively aggressive war on wokeness continues to steamroll along at a remarkable pace, considering how, until last November’s election, diversity seemed almost universally ...