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 ...

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government geared up to fight a long, twilight struggle to root out Jim Crow, starting numberless government agencies to combat discrimination, such as the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. But, deprived of government support, Jim Crow ...

I’ve read numberless op-eds in recent years lamenting conservative distrust of scientific experts. Yet, progressives are remarkably anti-expert when it comes to the venerable field of research into human intelligence. IQ psychometrics emerged as a scientific field of study in the first decade of ...

Genealogy is a popular hobby, but the concept of the family tree has attracted remarkably little highbrow thinking in recent centuries. Yet, the family tree is one of the most philosophically interesting entities imaginable. It seems hypothetical, like something Plato might have dreamed up. And ...

In the five years after the demise of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, what did we learn from the racial reckoning? I guess we learned not to do it again. Or so I hope. Hence, let’s take a look at the data on the issue that was said to be the cause of the storm: Is there racial bias in police ...

A number of own goals by the Trump administration led to Democratic resistance finally stiffening in April. Yet Trump’s impressively aggressive war on wokeness continues to steamroll along at a remarkable pace, considering how, until last November’s election, diversity seemed almost universally ...

Directing a film is a little like coaching a football team—both are jobs for natural leaders of men—but strikingly few auteurs played serious team sports after age 18. Ron Shelton, director of the baseball movie Bull Durham, played five years of minor-league ball. Richard Linklater pitched in ...

A fundamental problem with nationalism is that it tends to pit natural nationalists against each other in stupid spats, when they’d be better off forming loose coalitions against globalists. For example, aggressive American nationalism, such as Trump’s talk about “annexing” Canada as the ...