Drowning in Data

I think I’ve stumbled upon one type of education that actually would effectively reduce an unfortunate racial gap. Most forms of instruction don’t, of course. In the first dozen years of this century, billionaires such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and politicians like George W. Bush and ...

Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban: The Bumptious Billionaire

It’s a striking aspect of how out-of-fashion Diversity-Inclusion-Equity has suddenly become in the wake of Claudine Gay’s ouster as the president of Harvard that the most prominent person to take to Twitter to defend DIE has been Mark Cuban: DEI does not mean you dont hire on merit. Of course ...

Pedestrian Logic

Why are American pedestrians getting run over so much more often than a decade and a half ago? You’re not just imagining it: It really has gotten more dangerous to cross the street. Since 2009, the worst year of the Great Recession, pedestrian death rates per 100,000 people increased 63 percent ...

Tyrone Bogues

The Tall and Short of It

What’s the most common first name for an African-American NBA player? D’Qantivious? T’Variusness? Nah, it turns out that black pro basketball players are most commonly named Chris, followed by similarly middle-class names such as James, Marcus, Mike, and Eric. According to data scientist ...

Jewish Generosity

As I’ve long pointed out, the most likely fault line where the Democrats’ imposing but fragile Coalition of the Fringes might fracture divides Jews and blacks. Two earlier black moments—the late-’60s Black Power era and the early-’90s Louis Farrakhan fad—both sputtered out when Jews ...

DIE in the Air

As I may have mentioned now and then, there’s much wrong about the 2020s, but it’s also worth mentioning something right: We’re living in the golden age of airliner safety. The last fatal crash of a commercial flight of an American airline was way back in 2009. (That year could have been ...

Joachim Phoenix as Napoleon

Little Boney Goes Hollywood

The Last Duel, a 2021 film by Sir Ridley Scott with Matt Damon as a mulleted French aristocrat chud battling honorably (if stupidly) a suave Adam Driver in 1386, turned out to be better than expected: not a classic, but quite decent, especially for a director in his mid-80s. (Sir Ridley turns 86 ...

Halting the Pursuit of Knowledge

This ought to be a golden age of the social sciences. The immense reduction in the cost of DNA testing is allowing massive assaults on the most venerable conundrums of nature vs. nurture, such as whether the IQ gap between whites and blacks is smaller in more racially admixed African-Americans as ...

Widener Library, Harvard University

A Barren Field

I’ve been writing about the perverse side effects of affirmative action for a third of a century, and one of my favorite examples has always been the recurrent attempts to lure more blacks into becoming architects. Having known a lot of architects, I’ve been pointing out that architecture ...

Shifting Support

The past month has led to agonizing reappraisals among some mainstream Jewish-American liberals over the traditional Jewish-American shibboleth that diversity must be good for the Jews. Not surprisingly to anybody who has been paying cold-blooded attention to the past half century, the older, ...