Don Quixote And Sancho Panza by Louis Aquetin

Mute Inglorious Shakespeares

In Michael Lewis’ new biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite, Lewis quotes the accused cryptocurrency embezzler’s rationalist case against Shakespeare: I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare...but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. ...

‘Elon Musk’: Purge and Surge

Walter Isaacson’s biography Elon Musk is as strong as you’d expect from the author of the enormous 2011 bestseller Steve Jobs. The subject of Isaacson’s last book The Code Breaker, Jennifer Doudna, the coinventor of the CRISPR gene-editing method, served as a reasonable representative of how ...

The Business of Diversity

What causes wokeness? Richard Hanania writes in his highly useful new book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, that: Conservatives have blamed wokeness on entities as diverse as capitalists, the education system, recently arrived ...

Chohan Rajpoots, Delhi. Circa 1868

Caste Away

India is in the spotlight as it throws the G20 economic conference. Its host, Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi, is fooling around, Elon Musk-style, with the idea of changing the name of his country to “Bharat” as an anti-colonial gesture. And the California legislature has, after ...

America’s Untouchables

In this decade, America’s most effective conservative activist has likely been Chris Rufo, who in 2020 came up with a winning euphemism for all the racist antiwhite hate suffusing our schools, streets, and screens during the racial reckoning: “Critical Race Theory,” Rufo called ...

Whatever You Can Get Away With

Theoretically, you could become a professor of ethnic studies without being the ethnicity you study, just as you can be a gerontologist without being old or a botanist without being a plant. Still, and while I don’t often offer career advice, trust me on this: Don’t try it. The pervasiveness ...

Broken Window of Opportunity

Many people have strong opinions on what’s the best place to live: city, suburb, or country? Yet, personally, I’ve enjoyed every place I’ve lived and would like to see each kind thrive. Hence, I’ve been vocally critical about the American establishment letting our big cities decay into ...

Thin Man

In director Christopher Nolan’s campaign to save moviegoing from technological and social obsolescence, his latest ploy is his most clever yet: to lure grown-ups with three-digit IQs to see his Oppenheimer in numbers that had no longer seemed attainable in the 2020s by making his film outstanding ...

In a Barbie World

One of the most fervently held dogmas of the 1969 wave of feminism was that the only reason boys and girls liked different toys was due to sexist socialization. I was young in the early 1970s when androgynous “unisex” fashions were all the rage even in the Sears catalogs, but even then I was ...

The Victim Sweepstakes

Signed a third of a century ago by George H.W. Bush, the landmark 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act remains an illuminating example of the curious ways in which politics and policy tend to operate in modern America. The central aspect of the ADA is that it’s a civil rights law, modeled on the ...