Damsels in Distress

Return of the WASP Woody Allen

Metropolitan, the 1990 dramedy about a group of chivalrous preppies whose debutante ball after-parties are so articulate and decorous that they might have driven J. Alfred Prufrock to throw a TV out the window like Keith Moon trashing a hotel suite, earned auteur Whit Stillman the appellation ...

The Rent May Be Too Damn Low

On May 14, 2011, Matthew Yglesias, a prominent Washington, DC liberal blogger and proponent of urban living, was walking home alone after a dinner with fellow pundits when he became the victim of an apparent anti-white racial hate crime. In what sounds like a game of Knockout King or Polar Bear ...

Tehran Comes to Hollywood

The Iranian film A Separation, a domestic drama-turned-courtroom mystery, is among the most acclaimed of recent movies. It won a host of film festival awards, the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and a nomination for Best Original Screenplay"€”a rarity for a subtitled film. This half-million-dollar ...

The Far East Rises in the West

The white/black test-score gap has been in the news since the 1960s, yet much like Mark Twain supposedly said about the weather, despite all the talk, nobody seems able to do much about it.  America in the later 21st century will likely be dominated numerically by blacks and Latinos. In 2008, the ...

Anthony Quinn

The Great Hollywood Brownout

Many people claim that they pay no attention to race, but then along comes the Jeremy Lin story to prove again that most folks do. Wikipedia, that embodiment of 21st-century attitudes, remains diligent about posting most of its subjects"€™ racial and ethnic background. I enjoy using their ...

Love: Still Not Colorblind

Has the gender gap in interracial relationships changed over the decades?  As an urbanite in the 1980s and 1990s in LA and Chicago, it was hard not to notice trends among interracial couples. Black/white couples typically featured a black man with a white woman. But among white/East Asian pairs, ...

The War of the Cradle

What has the recent hubbub over “contraception” really been about? On the surface, it’s all maneuvering for the 2012 election, but the passions unleashed, especially on the liberal side, suggest motivations that are more inchoate than tactical. Few topics are more important than the ...

Mitt Romney

The Creepily Normal Mormon

In his new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, master social scientist Charles Murray flavors his portrait of the widening gap between the classes with some human interest by referring to the bottom 30% of American whites as “Fishtown” (after the gritty Philadelphia ...

Michelle and Barack Obama

The Obamas: Not Quite the Huxtables

In her new book The Obamas, Jodi Kantor, a New York Times White House correspondent, recounts that Jacqueline Kennedy once fled the White House without her tomcatting husband for a month’s vacation in Florida, dumping her tiny son on her relatives. During that spell, JFK only bothered to visit ...

Crimethink and Thinking Ability

What’s the latest from the scientific frontlines in the IQ Wars? As you’ll recall from the press, the Bad Guys are social scientists such as Arthur Jensen, Linda Gottfredson, Charles Murray, and the late Richard Herrnstein. They have all argued that there are differences in average intelligence ...