Tenure—lifetime employment for college professors—is under attack from all sides. The American custom of granting thirtysomething professors the right to a job for life was traditionally said by its defenders to go back to the 1900 dispute between robber baroness Jane Stanford and Edward ...

Occasionally, big media institutions still do valuable reporting. As you’ll recall, the prestige press humiliated themselves back in January when the story first broke about how five black Memphis policemen beat a black motorist to death. The media’s initial response was heavy on explaining ...

Perhaps because this has seemed like the coldest winter I can recall in normally balmy Southern California, I got to wondering: Why do northerners tend to be smarter than southerners? Is it because of the north’s cold winters, as Charles Murray, a son of Iowa, recently suggested on Twitter? To ...

I was going to write another heavy duty current events data analysis column, but then I got distracted and/or lazy, so this essay is going to wander off to a more fun topic. When I saw the headline that senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) had finally announced she would retire in 2025 at age 91, I got ...

Last week I answered the common question of whether the higher black male crime rate is due to poverty when growing up by diving into Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s immense database: No, it turns out, black men are about four times more likely than white men whose parents had the exact same ...

Since May 25, 2020, America has crucified itself over a single statistic: Blacks are two to three times more likely to die at the hands of the police than are whites, making up 25 to 35 percent of police killings. In contrast, other data points that could add nuance to the conversation are ...

As we are constantly lectured, race does not exist. Yet, almost nobody points out that the conventional wisdom that races are wholly arbitrary social constructs is actually far truer for the popular concept of “generations,” such as baby boomers, millennials, and Alphas. For instance, it’s ...

One downside of reading me is that tomorrow’s headlines aren’t as full of surprises. For example, while much of the media world is currently stunned that the five Memphis cops who beat a black motorist to death are black, my regular readers aren’t. I start with empirical observations and ...

Traffic fatalities, like murders, should be in steady decline due to improving technology and big data analyses of danger spots leading to better policing and infrastructure. That’s happening in much of the world, but not in the U.S. in this decade. For example, in a serious country, Japan, in ...

Institutional momentum continues to build in wealthy parts of the country where blacks were historically least oppressed by slavery and Jim Crow for cashing in white guilt over George Floyd as racial reparations before whites wise up (or cynical Asians and Hispanics take over). For example, posh ...