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 ...

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 ...