Greenwich Village, NY

666,666,666 Immigrants

Center-left Vox pundit Matthew Yglesias’ new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger is actually two contradictory polemics. The book is both a sensible call ...

Oliver Stone, 1987

‘Chasing the Light’: Mild Stone

While increasingly forgotten today, writer-director Oliver Stone might have been the most talked-about figure in American popular culture from 1986 through 1992, when the press ...

Deaths of Despair

In 2017, 158,000 Americans died from what we call deaths of despair: suicide, overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis. This is the equivalent of three full 737 MAXs ...

Secession Studies

Frank H. Buckley’s highbrow yet quick and lively new book American Secession comes with the foreboding subtitle The Looming Threat of a National Breakup, but the conservative ...

Occam’s Butter Knife

In contrast to Angela Saini’s acclaimed but dismal 2019 work of science denialism, Superior: The Return of Race Science, Adam Rutherford’s 2020 book How to Argue With a ...

The Anti–Larry David

The energetic media tycoon Ezra Klein has a book out titled Why We’re Polarized. Spoiler alert: One reason is because too many people watch Fox News instead of reading Klein’s ...

Forming a More Perfect Union

In the middle of August 1982, I was unemployed and looking for a job in New York City. A friend from MBA school called to say he could get me an interview at his Wall Street firm, ...

Charles Murray Goes Meta

Social scientists tend to be leftists, but the bulk of their findings have long tended to support rightists. Charles Murray, a rare man of the right in the social sciences, has ...

Civil Rights Gone Wrong

A couple of heavyweight conservative thinkers, Charles Murray and Christopher Caldwell, have important new books out this month: Murray’s upcoming Human Diversity: The Biology ...

‘Serotonin’: A Love Letter to Protectionism

French reactionary writer Michel Houellebecq became world-famous on Jan. 7, 2015, when a caricature of him appeared on the cover of Charlie Hebdo to promote his new novel ...

Harold Bloom

The Cultural Levelers Lose a Formidable Foe

The cultural levelers lost a formidable foe this week, the literary critic Harold Bloom dying on Monday at 89 years old. Bloom was still teaching at Yale, where he had spent a ...

Redwood State Park, CA

Manifesto Destiny

This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Calcutta-born NYU journalism professor Suketu Mehta takes pro-immigration polemics to their logical conclusion: “Immigration ...

Arguing Against Reality

The term “Gell-Mann Amnesia effect” was coined by the late novelist Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) in honor of the famous physicist who died last month. Murray Gell-Mann had ...

Jared Diamond

The Hunt for the Great White Male

Jared Diamond, who became a famous public intellectual when his 1997 best-seller Guns, Germs, and Steel was widely proclaimed to have refuted The Bell Curve by arguing that the ...

Hadrian's Wall

Barriers Against Barbarism

One of the most fashionable manifestations of Trump derangement syndrome—the assumption that Walls Never Work—is crushingly debunked in historian David Frye’s eye-opening ...

LARPing Hate

Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War is a timely and witty new book from Wilfred Reilly, a youngish black professor of political science at Kentucky State. He ...


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