Since the previous century I’ve been articulating in the public arena an array of interconnecting ideas about how the world works. For example, I tend to suspect that racial differences in achievement in 2021 have more to do with nature and nurture, with culture and human biodiversity, than with ...
Gun murders are up 34.4 percent in the 365 days since George Floyd’s death. According to data scraped from Gun Violence Archive, in the Year One B.F. (Before Floyd) from May 25, 2019, to May 24, 2020, there were 13,024 murders committed with a firearm in the U.S. In contrast, in the Year One ...
What matters most: nature or nurture, genes or environment, ancestry or upbringing? The conventional wisdom argues for the malleable latter, even though twin and adoption studies typically find more substantial evidence for nature than for nurture. Yet, I would like to encourage hereditarians to ...
I hadn’t planned to buy the new authorized biography of novelist Philip Roth, author of Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral, because I am at best a lazy admirer of Roth, having read only a handful of books by the indefatigable novelist who died in 2017 at 85. But when I saw it on the ...
Back in May 2013, it dawned on me that, crazy as it sounded in those more innocent times, the Establishment was gearing up to make transgenderism into the next big thing. Lately, my Spidey sense for zeitgeist trends has started tingling again, telling me that my old jokes about how the “equity” ...
During America’s current racial crisis, it’s striking how useless and irrelevant has been the intellectual conventional wisdom, which denies that race even exists. So I’m going to step back from the daily fray this week and sketch out a stylized history of how we came to have two opposing ...
When Joe Biden was 21, liberalism peaked on Nov. 3, 1964, as Lyndon Baines Johnson won over 61 percent of the popular vote and 486 of the 535 electoral votes. On his coattails, Congressional Democrats were carried by LBJ to a 68–32 margin in the Senate and a 295–140 edge in the House. Of the ...
As I’ve been known to point out, the “equity” that the all-conquering Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) crusade truly wants is your equity in your home. Current developments in Evanston, Ill., and Manhattan Beach, Calif., are starting to give us a sense of how today’s increasingly ...
The English stage’s second Elizabethan Age might not compare to its first, but it’s been nothing to be ashamed of. And Sir Tom Stoppard has been the closest to its Shakespeare. Strikingly, of all the major English-language authors of the later 20th century, Stoppard was the most dedicated ...
Everybody is talking about murders, such as the Atlanta massage parlor massacres, the Muslim terrorist in Boulder, and the Washington, D.C., adolescent girl carjackers. But tiny sample sizes of spectacular crimes allow polemicists to hype whichever claims they want. What we need are large amounts ...
