Reasons for Hope

In the week since my column “Crushing the Coronavirus Curve,” Americans and Britons have rapidly woken up to the pandemic threat and started to take action. One reason awareness grew so rapidly is because of the surge in celebrities testing positive for COVID-19, such as Tom Hanks. Similarly, ...

Crushing the Coronavirus Curve

For weeks, the coronavirus news has been paralyzingly bad, leaving President Trump, the Democratic candidates, and the media with little to offer in the way of pragmatic or inspiring leadership on the issue. But over the past few days, data on new infections in Wuhan, China and in South Korea ...

Secession Studies

Frank H. Buckley’s highbrow yet quick and lively new book American Secession comes with the foreboding subtitle The Looming Threat of a National Breakup, but the conservative George Mason U. law professor and Trump family adviser is sanguine. In Buckley’s view, a Trump reelection combined with ...

Ranking Ruth

I recently unfairly baited the great baseball statistics thinker Bill James into responding at vast length to one of my snarky tweets, which got me thinking about what we could learn from baseball history about how the media often gets The Narrative wrong. The intellectual rigor of baseball ...

Occam’s Butter Knife

In contrast to Angela Saini’s acclaimed but dismal 2019 work of science denialism, Superior: The Return of Race Science, Adam Rutherford’s 2020 book How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality benefits from Rutherford’s lively prose style. The British science writer likes ...

The Anti–Larry David

The energetic media tycoon Ezra Klein has a book out titled Why We’re Polarized. Spoiler alert: One reason is because too many people watch Fox News instead of reading Klein’s properties like Vox. Another cause is because somebody imprudently spilled the beans to “white Christians” that ...

Forming a More Perfect Union

In the middle of August 1982, I was unemployed and looking for a job in New York City. A friend from MBA school called to say he could get me an interview at his Wall Street firm, J.P. Morgan. But Wall Street work was not a gold mine in 1982 because the stock market had been in the doldrums since ...

Charles Murray Goes Meta

Social scientists tend to be leftists, but the bulk of their findings have long tended to support rightists. Charles Murray, a rare man of the right in the social sciences, has been pointing out this paradox since his 1984 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. Now 77, Murray ...

Civil Rights Gone Wrong

A couple of heavyweight conservative thinkers, Charles Murray and Christopher Caldwell, have important new books out this month: Murray’s upcoming Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class and Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Caldwell, a distinguished ...

Call of Duty: ‘1917’

2019 turned out to be a good year for quality guy movies after all, as several veteran directors ignored the anti-male zeitgeist and just shot the films they’ve long wanted to make, such as Joker, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, The Irishman, and Ford v Ferrari. Sam Mendes, for example, delivers ...