Whatever You Can Get Away With

Theoretically, you could become a professor of ethnic studies without being the ethnicity you study, just as you can be a gerontologist without being old or a botanist without being a plant. Still, and while I don’t often offer career advice, trust me on this: Don’t try it. The pervasiveness ...

Broken Window of Opportunity

Many people have strong opinions on what’s the best place to live: city, suburb, or country? Yet, personally, I’ve enjoyed every place I’ve lived and would like to see each kind thrive. Hence, I’ve been vocally critical about the American establishment letting our big cities decay into ...

Thin Man

In director Christopher Nolan’s campaign to save moviegoing from technological and social obsolescence, his latest ploy is his most clever yet: to lure grown-ups with three-digit IQs to see his Oppenheimer in numbers that had no longer seemed attainable in the 2020s by making his film outstanding ...

In a Barbie World

One of the most fervently held dogmas of the 1969 wave of feminism was that the only reason boys and girls liked different toys was due to sexist socialization. I was young in the early 1970s when androgynous “unisex” fashions were all the rage even in the Sears catalogs, but even then I was ...

The Victim Sweepstakes

Signed a third of a century ago by George H.W. Bush, the landmark 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act remains an illuminating example of the curious ways in which politics and policy tend to operate in modern America. The central aspect of the ADA is that it’s a civil rights law, modeled on the ...

Kids These Days

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State, has been sounding the alarm for years that the mental health of American young people is falling apart under the influence of smartphones and social media. She’s bulwarked her case impressively in her 2023 book Generations: The Real ...

Does Diversity Equal Adversity?

Now that the Supreme Court has finally ruled that affirmative action in college admissions violates the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws” clause, what will the Establishment come up with next to put its thumb on the scale in favor of blacks? One word that you’ll be hearing is ...

Class and Family

One of the more fascinating scholarly oeuvres of the 21st century is economic historian Gregory Clark’s planned trilogy of books with bad Hemingway puns for titles. In 2007 came Clark’s speculations on the causes of the Industrial Revolution, A Farewell to Alms, with its immodest subtitle, A ...

It’s the Indians, Nikole

Back in 2019, the executive editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet, reassured a restive newsroom that while, admittedly, the Times’ plan A to dump Trump—Russiagate—had failed ignominiously with the release of the Mueller Report, they shouldn’t worry because the newspaper’s plan B to ...

Data Download

We live in an age blessed with ever-improving social science data, but few realize that, much less grasp its findings. The latest generation of longitudinal tracking databases can use genetic data to help find long-sought answers to politically crucial questions about race and IQ, but liberals ...