This Sporting Life

Say you have an athletic child in middle school: Specializing in which sport in high school would make it most likely for your son or daughter to earn a college scholarship? The new self-help book from data scientist Seth ...

The Wealth of Notions

How can we explain the varying wealth of nations? This question has long elicited a wealth of notions. Thus, in my quarter century as a book reviewer, I’ve always been a sucker for taking on ambitious theory-and-history-of-everything ...

John von Neumann

Math Appeal

The 1940s, when so many new technologies such as atomic weapons and computers were rushed into existence, remains the peak real-life science-fiction decade. So there’s a steady demand from highbrow readers for biographies of the ...

Kurt Cobain

‘The Nineties’: Moments of Clarity

When it was suggested that I review the new nonfiction book The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman, I assumed he would be an ideal analyst of that distant decade because, after all, he’d written that very 1990s novel Fight Club, hadn’t ...

A Simpler Life

The only written words of mine that have ever had a practical effect on the world appeared in my review of Alexander McCall Smith’s book The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Mine was the first review in the national press, and I like ...

Will Blacks Survive the Racial Reckoning?

Wow, the racial reckoning after George Floyd sure has gotten a lot of black people killed! According to the FBI, amid the extravaganza of violence following Floyd's death in 2020, an additional 2,400 black males and 405 black females ...

From Dreamland to Nightmareland

With the CDC estimating last month that drug overdose deaths rose over 30 percent in the first twelve months of the pandemic to nearly 100,000, Sam Quinones’ outstanding new sequel to his award-winning 2015 book Dreamland: The True ...

Give the Dog Narcan

Terrific investigative reporter Sam Quinones, author of the 2015 book, Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, is about to release a new book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and ...

Rational Treasure

In Steven Pinker’s latest book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, the best-selling cognitive scientist comes out, perhaps unsurprisingly, in favor of rationality. Since the 1990s, Pinker has been a leading ...

Harden’s Folly

Behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality has been much anticipated by scientists worried that the dumbing down of discourse in the name of diversity might eventually ...

Last Men Standing: Charles Murray vs. Ibram X. Kendi

The media-declared racial reckoning has elicited from Charles Murray, coauthor of 1994’s epochal The Bell Curve, an important rebuttal: a short, lucid book entitled Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. In January 2020, ...

Roth vs. Updike

I hadn’t planned to buy the new authorized biography of novelist Philip Roth, author of Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral, because I am at best a lazy admirer of Roth, having read only a handful of books by the indefatigable ...


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