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 ...

Windsor Castle

Motte and Bailey vs. Outpost and Heartland

One oddity of discourse is that novel phrases seem more likely to catch on if their meanings are opaque than if they are self-evident. Having to know a semisecret code makes phrases such as “motte and bailey argument” more popular, not less. For example, as a term for when something passes its ...

‘Little Women’: Tween Tale

The umpteenth remake of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s witty 1868 girls’ novel about growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, during the Civil War, is directed by Greta Gerwig and stars her alter ego, the lovely Irish lass Saoirse Ronan, as Jo March. As with the five sisters of Jane Austen’s ...

‘Richard Jewell’: The Problem With Profiling

Richard Jewell is director Clint Eastwood’s well-acted, solidly scripted biopic about the racial-profiling fiasco that undermined the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing investigation. The FBI monomaniacally targeted an innocent rent-a-cop for being a Frustrated White Man, and then leaked his name to ...

Christopher Plummer

The U.K. vs. U.S. Detective Debate

The mystery movie Knives Out is an allegory about how Americans deserve to lose our homeland to Latin American immigrants out of our self-destructive hatred for each other. But that’s a good thing, the film says, because Latin Americans are so much nicer than we are. Which is probably not an ...

‘Midway’: Effective Bang-Bang-Boom-Boom

Midway is a surprisingly accurate and competent WWII movie about the most thrilling naval battle in American history. While only 38 percent of film critics gave the film a thumbs-up, 92 percent of its audience approved. It doesn’t rank with the best films of 2019, but gay German blockbuster ...