A Half Century of Amnesia

Back during the protracted recount following the 2000 Bush-Gore election, I offered a subversive bit of advice in a VDARE article entitled: “GOP Future Depends on Winning Larger Share of the White Vote.” Bush’s boy-genius strategist Karl Rove had achieved acclaim by declaring that the only ...

The Disco Triplets

The popular new documentary Three Identical Strangers recounts the famous story of the New York triplets who were secretly separated as infants due to (spoiler alert) an arrogant Freudian experiment intended to prove the power of nurture over nature. But as 19-year-olds, they found one another ...

What’s Your Type?

Four LAPD squad cars pulled up in front of my house, lights flashing. Why? It turned out that the middle-aged divorced dad who had recently rented the house down the block had misplaced his keys and tried to break in through his window. A neighbor who hadn’t met the newcomer saw him and called ...

Surfer Privilege

How high of a standard of living did young baby boomers enjoy, especially those of us fortunate to grow up on the then lightly populated West Coast? That question kept coming to mind while reading the acclaimed 2015 memoir of a youth spent at the beach in California and Hawaii, Barbarian Days: A ...

Andrés Manuel López Obrador

Mexico’s Next Chapter

Mexico’s establishment party got kicked to the curb in Sunday’s election, winning only 16 percent of the vote, which should remind us that we are constantly told two rather contradictory things about immigration from Latin America: —First, immigrants are pouring in from the banana republics ...

Review: The Incredibles 2

What proportion of the top creative artists in Hollywood, the heavyweight auteurs, are men of the right? This old question has come up again with the box office triumph of the anti-egalitarian Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 and the comments about Donald Trump by David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks ...

Elizabeth Holmes

Blood Simple

Once the reelected Obama administration gave the okay for the diversity industry to begin shaking down Silicon Valley like it does everybody else, we began to read over and over that the reason there are few female tech founders is because the white male power structure leaves billion-dollar bills ...

Two Opposed Ideas

A new contender in the war of books over the implications of the onrushing discoveries in genetics is the exhaustive 656-page She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer, winner of the 2016 Stephen Jay Gould Prize. Zimmer, who is more or less ...

Philip Roth

Wolfe and Roth: A Look Back

The deaths this month of literary giants Tom Wolfe, age 88, and Philip Roth, 85, illuminated a little-noticed divide in American life. The two writers were fairly comparable combinations of talent, energy, ambition, and personality, so it’s instructive to see how their reputations ...

Tiger Woods

The Tiger Mother’s Son

A year ago, after a decade of worsening pain from swinging hard since infancy, Tiger Woods, perhaps the highest-paid athlete in history, appeared headed for the same fate as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Prince, and Tom Petty. But this spring Woods is grinding away again on tour, playing surprisingly ...