Let’s Be Over and Done in ’21

It’s only natural to be frightened of getting a needle stuck in your arm loaded with a novel vaccine developed at such a pace that few besides the optimistic President Trump believed it could be rolled out this year. Likewise, it’s common to be either hypochondriacal about a new infectious ...

Herman Mankiewicz

That Touch of ‘Mank’

The best movie comedies of the 1930s were largely written by former newspaper reporters who had also tried their hand at writing for the New York stage before being seduced by Hollywood’s sunshine and lucre. Today, we think of journalists as PR staffers for the conventional wisdom, killjoys ...

Are We What We Watch?

When reviewing movies, I’m less interested in propounding whether or not a film is, in my opinion, good than in explaining which types of people would find this a good film. As an old market researcher, it is only natural for me to pay attention to who would like what, which makes me less ...

The Cloud Gate, Chicago, IL

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Six months into the Racial Reckoning, it’s timely to review A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America by a conventional liberal criminologist named Elliott Currie of the U. of California at Irvine: Much of the country has been understandably outraged by the ...

Build Back Dumber

With Moderna’s announcement on Monday of a second extremely effective vaccine (which reduces your chance of getting COVID by 18/19ths) to go along with Pfizer’s vaccine, we can now see a definite light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. This will prove disappointing to many elites, who have ...

The New Normal: By Any Means Necessary

A huge question is whether the shameful and shameless tactics deployed by the Establishment against Donald Trump in 2020—censoring online media, editorializing the news, covering up mass lawbreaking, blacklisting, threats of additional riots if Biden is not elected, and much more—will be ...

Donald Trump

The Trump Review

Being a Wednesday-morning columnist is a good gig, except the day after Election Day when nobody will be interested in whatever statistics I’d researched on Monday. So, having no clue how the voting turned out yesterday, let me try to be at least vaguely relevant by finally getting around to ...

Violent Victimizations

With the conventional wisdom increasingly prejudiced and extremist on the question of who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys, how much longer can we expect the federal government to collect and publish objective crime statistics by race? After all, nothing undermines The Narrative more than ...

The Only Polemicists Left

“Why Is Wokeness Winning?” asks veteran pundit Andrew Sullivan, recently fired by New York magazine for distressing its more fragile younger staffers by thinking for himself. Sullivan sums up the idiotic but undeniable reasons for the real-world success of Critical Race Theory: It gives you ...

Slaughter in the Cities

Establishment voices are finally, grudgingly admitting that murders and shootings are up spectacularly in 2020. But the reasons, they all agree, are immensely complicated and rather boring. Perhaps, they muse, it has something to do with lockdowns? Or there could be any number of other subtly ...