Vice stars Christian Bale, Christopher Nolan’s Batman, in an eerily impeccable impersonation of former vice president Dick Cheney. Amy Adams is forceful as the veep’s intellectual wife, Lynne Cheney, and Sam Rockwell is wonderfully well cast as George W. Bush. With a trio that strong ...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a prodigious intellectual who has managed to build a significant following with his books on investing and “tail risk,” such as The Black Swan and Skin in the Game. Yet he’s never quite gotten Watsoned out of polite society for his variegated crimethinking. All this ...

The prestige of the intersectional is pushing respectable opinion in anti-science directions, as seen in the resurgent prestige of astrology and witchcraft. Granted, perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much what lowbrows who like horoscopes and spells are into, but it probably does matter that ...

The end of the year always brings a plethora of “Best of...” rankings in the press, which, to be honest, tend to be prefab junk journalism by writers trying to get ahead so they can take some time off around Christmas. I’ll have to admit that over the years I’ve perpetrated a few such ...

A new study in Science, “Quantifying reputation and success in art,” documents that in the contemporary art world, it’s less a matter of what you know than whom you know. Art economist Magnus Resch writes in Art News this week of what he has learned from his database of prices paid for ...

Shortly after this month’s election, an Antifa mob descended upon the Washington, D.C., home of Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, his wife, and their four children, chanting, “Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night.” Why all the hate for Carlson? For example, ...

Diversity is supposed to be “our strength,” but the interracial romance marketplace generates much resentment among those groups, such as black women and East Asian men, who tend to be in less demand than their racial rivals. For example, over the years I’ve read hundreds of op-eds by ...

The Coen brothers’ eighteenth movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, might be their whitest yet, despite Mrs. Joel Coen, Frances McDormand, having devoted her Best Actress speech at last March’s Oscars to demanding “inclusion.” Since Blood Simple in 1984, Joel and Ethan Coen have never ...

Bohemian Rhapsody is a crowd-pleasing biopic about the life and sadly early death of Queen’s singer Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) that subversively depicts the roots of the AIDS epidemic. Rather than portray Mercury in the now-traditional manner—as a martyr to Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s ...

Is First Man, Damien Chazelle’s moody and moving biopic featuring Ryan Gosling as astronaut Neil Armstrong, anti-American for not having a flag in it? Actually, this family drama features a lovely shot of Armstrong’s young son raising the American flag at his school while his father is on ...