In these willfully ignorant times, the powers that be seem, in their haste to be politically correct, to forget that America fought its bloodiest war to end human bondage. Almost three-quarters of a million men died, yet the Civil War ...

This week I revisit a favorite theme: how poor interpretation leads to poor strategy. Like when rightists attribute the entire tranny phenomenon to “grooming,” an oversimplification that ignores the prevalence of middle-aged women ...

A government of the people, in Lincoln’s phrase, has changed by degrees into a people of the government. When one considers the number of duties or obligations one must fulfill to the government, it is clear who is boss in the ...

One of the most remarkable developments of recent years has been the legalization—dare I say, the institutionalization?—of corruption. This is not a matter of money passing under the table, or of bribery, though this no doubt goes ...

My taste in films is strange, at least in the statistical sense. I don’t like romance, I don’t like happy endings (they depress me), and I don’t like gratuitous or unrealistic violence. I like films that are serious, even when ...

There is nothing a strong government likes more than a weak people; and therefore, whether consciously or not, everything is done to render the people ever feebler. Not physically, of course, we are raising up giants of a size and ...

The Russian writer V.G. Korolenko (a kind of sub-Chekhov) once wrote that Man is made for happiness as a bird for flight: To which I can only say that this has not been my observation, or even experience, of life. If Man is made for ...

We live in an age of serial expertise. First we were experts in climate change, whether or not we believed it was taking place, and consequently in energy policy. Then, with Covid, we became expert epidemiologists, though most of us ...

I don’t care for kids; that’s why I never had any. That said, in my early 30s I did have one brief episode of dealing with children. I dated a Dominican woman who had an 11-year-old daughter. The absentee father was white. The kid ...

Last week was a good one, so it’s kind of dickish to make fun, but it’s really amusing how quickly some of you went from, in 2016, “We’re gonna get tired of winning,” to nervously awaiting the Youngkin/McAuliffe results ...

“No worst, there is none,” wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, about human states of mind. If he were alive today, he might write, “No most absurd, there is none,” about our current contortions of language. In a publication ...

According to a recent survey, more than half of child and adolescent psychiatrists in Britain report having been consulted by young patients distressed about climate change and the state of the environment. The alleged effects of ...