Gaston Gaston 1883

In his impressive first book, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society, entrepreneur/intellectual Jim Manzi has the makings of an airport best seller in the genre of Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Indeed, Uncontrolled is far more reliable than those two sometimes-dubious tomes.

Manzi certainly has a story worth telling. In 1999, at the peak of the tech start-up bubble, Manzi, an MIT math major-turned-business strategy consultant, founded Applied Predictive Technologies. After initially floundering, Manzi realized there could be a big market supplying corporate America with software for conducting experiments, or what he calls Randomized Field Trials (RFT): Will the main button on your home page get more clicks if it’s red or green? Will upgrading your motels’ lobbies pay off? Will issuing iPads to your sales force boost sales? 

We all have opinions, but we seldom test them using control groups. The FDA forces drug companies to use rigorous methodologies, so why not employ the gold standard in other businesses? (And what about social policies such as education and crime? Why, for example, has letting the 50 state governments serve as “the laboratories of democracy” fallen out of fashion in favor of federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind?)

Stumbling upon this potential gold mine forced Manzi into a major learning effort:

…I started to read and research the issues involved in experimental analysis of interventions, at first frantically, and then systematically over about ten years.

He discovered that great thinkers had long ago considered the problems he was now facing:

I iterated between our practical experiences trying to implement the approach and the rediscovery of historical academic and industrial research that had addressed what were really the same analytical issues.…I worked my way…from detailed study of the technical methods of clinical trials, back through [Ronald A.] Fisher, Donald Campbell, and other social scientists, ultimately to the pure philosophy of science.

This notion of a young software executive slowly realizing that his company’s survival depends upon answers to questions first wrestled with by giant intellects such as Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, David Hume, and even Shakespeare’s contemporary Francis Bacon is exciting. The hunt for old knowledge drives many popular thrillers such as The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure. Why not write a nonfiction book structured as a search for lost wisdom?

Unfortunately for Uncontrolled’s sales totals, Manzi has organized his book in the opposite fashion. Rather than begin in 1999 with Manzi dangling between ruin and riches, Uncontrolled’s first chapter, dauntingly entitled “Induction and the Problem of Induction” (presumably, the author didn’t use his own software to test how appealing his chapter names are), methodically starts in 1620 with Bacon’s Novum Organum.

Granted, Uncontrolled offers one of the most lucid and sensible historical overviews of the philosophy of science I’ve ever read. But how much demand is there at airport bookstores for philosophy of science? 

Jim should have put his business war stories up front, his chapters on how to conduct experiments next, and his philosophy later. The frequent fliers who buy business books are happy to get a few enjoyable chapters out of their best sellers. In contrast, the handful of folks who like philosophy of science enjoy reading densely argued books like Uncontrolled all the way through. 

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In a few years, when confidentiality agreements with clients are less of a stumbling block for him, Manzi should revisit this material, aiming at the broader business market instead of Uncontrolled’s tiny target audience of Reihan Salam’s highbrow conservative friends such as David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Tyler Cowen.

As a public policy book, Uncontrolled tries to answer the perennial question: What’s wrong with the social sciences? To Manzi, the problem is too many studies and not enough experiments. 

For example, Manzi points out that the evidence for Levitt’s popular theory in Freakonomics that legalizing abortion in 1973 caused crime to fall in the later 1990s is doubtful. In fact, Manzi notes, it’s largely based on a programming blunder Levitt made. 

But Manzi doesn’t have a suggestion for how his RFTs could have helped: randomized abortions? Moreover, as I pointed out to Levitt years before Uncontrolled in our debate at slate.com (apparently our names have since been redacted), he’d been negligent in checking the historical record. (Originally, Levitt plumb forgot the crack wars.) But many influential people seemed to wish Levitt’s story was true.

Manzi says the golden age of government-funded social-policy experiments was the late 1960s into the early 1980s. But he misses why social scientists lost enthusiasm for testing: Trials of progressive programs such as Head Start and the negative income tax turned out depressingly. What good social science has revealed—that parents matter, genes matter, race matters, sex matters, and IQ matters—is the opposite of what the vast majority of social scientists wanted to discover.

Ironically, social science has been quite successful at demonstrating the failures of social engineering. 

Sacha Baron Cohen

The Dictator is Sacha Baron Cohen’s fourth and—surprisingly—funniest movie, a definite improvement over his biggest hit Borat. But critics, who raved in 2006 about how Borat exposed the anti-Semitism throbbing in Red State America’s heart, are now having second thoughts about Baron Cohen’s unapologetic Zionism. As the Great Girls Whiteness Crisis of 2012 suggested, during the serious business of Obama’s reelection campaign anybody with a sense of humor is automatically suspect.

Baron, a sterling British comedian who is a sort of elongated Peter Sellers, plays Admiral General Aladeen, strongman of the North African rogue state of Wadiya, which is building a nuclear missile to menace Israel. The civilized world threatens air strikes against Wadiya unless Aladeen comes to New York City to grovel. When the vain buffoon finally arrives, his chief aide (portrayed by Sir Ben Kingsley) secretly has the tyrant’s famous beard shaved off and replaces him with his own impersonator, a dim-witted goatherd. The body double duly announces that Wadiya will surrender to the forces of democratic humanitarian interventionism in five days.
 
Meanwhile, the unrecognizable but unrepentant autocrat is sheltered by a naïve Brooklyn leftist. She’s played by the Anna Faris (Scary Movie) with a pixie hairdo, so Aladeen addresses her as “lesbian hobbit.” She kindly gives him a job at the inefficient and unsanitary feminist food co-op she tries to manage. By force of his authoritarian masculinity and awareness of human biodiversity, he whips her team of slackers and refugees into shape. For instance, the despot takes the seven-foot Sudanese Dinka, who comes from a tribe that has never heard of money, off the cash register and puts him to work stocking the top shelves. Thus, the co-op regains the contract to cater Wadiya’s capitulation ceremony, at which Aladeen plans to kill his double and tear up the new constitution.

Ever since Republican-allied Bibi Netanyahu’s 2009 election in Israel, America’s liberal press—presumably out of fear it might threaten Barack Hussein Obama’s reelection—has been warning that “Islamophobia” is an evil comparable to homophobia.

Yet Baron Cohen, whose grandmother lives in Israel, appears not to have gotten the memo. The Dictator indulges in almost every derogatory stereotype I’ve ever heard about Arabs and/or Muslims. And guess what? Stereotypes are funny, especially if motivated by an ethnic animus as deep-seated as Baron Cohen’s. The star, who speaks Hebrew, lovingly fondles all the throat-clearing sounds in Aladeen’s similarly Semitic Arabic.

Critics are finally starting to get the joke about Baron Cohen’s movies, or are at least getting worried that there is a joke. For instance, poor Andrew O’Hehir wonders in Salon, “What exactly is Sacha Baron Cohen up to?”

In the past, Baron Cohen’s satires have generated reams of excusatory explication about how the crude jokes are actually so meta that they’re really politically correct. But that gag is running a little thin with The Dictator, which is directed by Larry Charles (Larry David’s second fiddle on Seinfeld) and written by Baron Cohen, Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer—none of whom, I’ll hazard to guess, are Arabs poking gentle fun at their own people’s foibles.

What’s the common denominator behind Baron Cohen’s four movies, Ali G Indahouse, Borat, Bruno, and now The Dictator? This conundrum has baffled the best minds in the film criticism business. Yet consider why Baron Cohen goes out of his way in The Dictator to ridicule a seemingly harmless Brooklyn grocery co-op. A little Googling dredges up the five-year-long battle within the Park Slope Food Coop over whether to ban Israeli products to protest oppression of the Palestinians.

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Once you notice the pattern, the pieces fall into place: Baron Cohen never forgets. His four main characters have been animated by his weapons-grade animus against present or past foes of the Jews. At the pace he’s going, he might eventually get around to making a movie mocking the Amalekites, the Hebrews’ archetypal enemies since the Old Testament.

For example, Ali G, the “The Voice of the Yoof,” started out as an assimilated British Muslim chav (note Ali G’s references to his Uncle Jamal), but was retconned into Alistair Graham because WASPs are always fair game.

Why is Baron Cohen’s gay fashionista Bruno an Austrian? What has any Austrian ever done to the Jews?…oh.

How about Borat, who is supposed to be a Kazakh? Why would a Jewish man hate Kazakhs?…oh. “Kazakhs” equal (in Baron Cohen’s mind) “Cossacks,” as in the pogrom right before the intermission in Fiddler on the Roof. (At Cambridge University, Baron Cohen played Tevye.)

Baron Cohen doesn’t portray Borat as an exotic Central Asian; he plays him as one long Polack joke. In an essay in the Jewish Daily Forward about the roots of Baron Cohen’s comedy perceptively titled “Life Among the Goyim,” Andrew R. Heinze, author of Jews and the American Soul, notes:

In Borat, we see the recycling of one of the most basic stereotypes in the Jewish imagination: the viscerally antisemitic Slavic peasant.

Humor’s chief engine is hostility, and Jewish hostility has driven comedy forward for much of the last century. It’s OK to allow yourself to finally get the joke.

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp

In Tom Stoppard’s 1982 drama The Real Thing, a middle-aged playwright and his daughter discuss Elvis Presley’s death:

Henry: I never went for him much. ‘All Shook Up’ was the last good one. However, I suppose that’s the fate of all us artists.
Debbie: Death?
Henry: People saying they preferred the early stuff.

Because film director Tim Burton works in a fairly narrow groove of style, subject, and cast, his career offers an unusually clear opportunity to consider why people prefer the early stuff. His fifteenth feature, horror comedy Dark Shadows, with Johnny Depp as a courteous 18th-century vampire who comes back to life in 1972, isn’t all that different from 1990’s Edward Scissorhands, the first of Burton’s eight movies with Depp. (It’s also Burton’s seventh with his girlfriend Helena Bonham Carter in a supporting role.) Dark Shadows is about what you’d expect.

And that raises the question: Would the 2012 film seem better than Edward Scissorhands if the pair had been switched at birth, with Dark Shadows premiering in 1990? Might audiences yet unborn someday prefer Shadows to Scissorhands the way the 1956 John Ford-John Wayne collaboration The Searchers is slowly edging out the pair’s initial effort, 1939’s Stagecoach?

There are two main reasons why audiences generally prefer the early stuff. The first is a Darwinian selection effect. If Stagecoach had been bad, Ford and Wayne wouldn’t have made another 23 films together. The second is that much of what we like about artists is less their creativity than the freshness of their unique personalities. The most memorable artists compete in our minds against their younger selves for our affections—a battle that’s hard to win.

Burton is either deeply loyal to his actors or very shy about meeting new people, For instance, after comic actor Michael Keaton’s over-the-top performance made Beetlejuice a hit in 1988, Burton perplexingly cast the unimposing Keaton as Bruce Wayne. Like most of Burton’s eccentric choices, Batman turned out financially fine.

Burton is a brand-name director sui generis. After growing up a weird kid in Burbank, he went on to make stylized, idiosyncratic movies which haul in bundles of conventional cash. Domestically, he’s the eighth-highest-grossing director ever (not accounting for inflation), and lately he’s done even better overseas. Since the Burton-Depp-Bonham Carter trio’s last outing, Alice in Wonderland, made a billion dollars worldwide during 2010’s 3-D fad, Burton garnered a $150-million budget for Dark Shadows.

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It’s an absurd amount to spend on a movie based on a notoriously low-budget television show. This 1966-1971 soap opera started out as a moody Jane Eyre-like tale of a governess in a moldering Maine mansion. Out of ratings desperation, a courtly vampire named Barnabas Collins was tossed into the mix, launching a fad. (During my entire life I’ve been reading clever explications of why vampires are now in style at this moment in our history—usually something involving whoever is president—but I haven’t noticed that vampires are ever long out of fashion.)

Baby boomer proto-Goths raced home from school to see the 1,225 episodes that were ground out on a Stakhanovite schedule. The quality was dire, but the supernatural elements helped justify the pregnant pauses and long, meaningful glances inherent in any soap’s production schedule. Likewise, while all long-running soap operas eventually stumble around to plotlines involving evil twins, being able to blame it on a witch’s curse at least made a little more sense. 

Both Burton and Depp enjoyed Dark Shadows in reruns in the 1970s, so with all the money in the world, why not make a tribute to their adolescent infatuation? As demonstrated by their upbeat biopic about the worst director ever, Ed Wood, at heart the pair aren’t satirists, they’re enthusiasts.

The original TV show eventually got gayed-up. But the Burton-Depp persona, while never terribly masculine (Depp has flopped recently playing alpha males John Dillinger and Hunter S. Thompson), is highly heterosexual: not gay, just fey. And Depp is quite funny in his stranger-in-a-strange-land role as the revived vampire.

As in most Burton movies, there’s no particular plot. The ending with the 220-year-old witch (Eva Green) falling apart is lifted bodily from Robert Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her.

The 53-year-old Burton absolutely nails what 1972 seemed like to an adolescent. A prosperous, cheerful year, 1972 was the last point when the social decay inherent in the 60s was still more of an elite affectation than a mass affliction. I suspect that the moment when the 70s fell apart for good was January 22, 1973, after which many Americans apparently took the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision as an endorsement from on high to party hearty.

Viewed objectively, Dark Shadows might actually be better than Edward Scissorhands. Burton and Depp ought to have it down pat by now. Yet perhaps Burton used up all his good ideas on his early films. Then again, an artificial boy who has scissors for hands isn’t that great of an idea for anybody over age nine.

It was a bad weekend for Nicolas “The American in Paris” Sarkozy but a great weekend at the global box office for what the French sniffily call l’empire américain’s hyperpuissance.

Marvel’s The Avengers, a comic-book movie featuring a half-dozen old-fashioned superheroes such as Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), start out sparring before joining forces.

The Marvel Studios movies, going back to Downey’s triumphant performance in 2008’s Iron Man, have illuminated how America’s dominance of international pop culture is intertwined with its military might.

In Bryan Singer’s 2006 Superman Returns, the Man of Steel’s catchphrase “truth, justice, and the American way” was toned down to “truth, justice, all that stuff” to avoid offending more tender sensibilities at home and potential ticket-buyers abroad. But from Iron Man’s opening scene depicting reactionary weapons-maker Tony Stark and some GIs rocking and rolling across Afghanistan’s plains, Marvel has been confident in the box-office brawn derived from the military-industrial complex’s renown for ass-kickery.

Today’s youth aren’t really into rebellion and outlawry. They fantasize about organization—the more awesome, the better.

Perhaps all those The Making of… documentaries included on DVDs inculcated a love of military precision. A movie set is a sort of pretend military operation with the director as the commanding officer. (But you can’t enlist unless your uncle was in the union. And what neither the recruiters nor the documentaries tell you is that the main sensation of both is Hurry Up and Wait.)

Much of The Avengers, therefore, takes place on a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier that flies. It’s not powered by some cost-effective superpower, either. Instead, it hovers due to colossal helicopter rotors that look like a project on which Lockheed Martin would run $500 billion over budget.

Whedon’s fictitious Helicarrier is equipped with J-35 vertical landing fighters, a quasi-real warplane first seen in the 2007 blockbuster Live Free or Die Hard, but which remains, five years later, still in flight tests despite its estimated $1.5-trillion lifetime cost. Every Pentagon gizmo in The Avengers had me scratching my head and wondering: How much am I going to be paying in taxes for the rest of my life for this boondoggle?

I often confuse Whedon with J. J. Abrams (Star Trek), the twin kings of Comic-Con. Both sci-fi auteurs are gigantically energetic storytellers who grew up in showbiz. (Whedon’s grandfather was a Leave it to Beaver writer.)

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Whedon is the one who looks much like the Marvel Universe’s Agent Coulson (played by Clark Gregg, son of an Episcopalian minister). Typically in movies, this kind of bland government operative is automatically sinister (for example, Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith in The Matrix). But Agent Coulson is Whedon’s surrogate, a nice guy fanboy (he hopes Captain America will sign his superhero trading cards) with whom audiences identify.

The notion of a movie-military-industrial complex can also shed light on the strange career arc of Jeremy Renner, who isn’t getting any handsomer but is getting richer. He plays Hawkeye, ace archer and the second of three big-budget American secret agents Renner will have portrayed in the span of twelve months (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol late last year and The Bourne Legacy upcoming). The ascent of the stumpy Renner is a bit like Humphrey Bogart’s improbable late-in-life transformation from society scion to tough-guy leading man. Renner rather looks like a hillbilly Bogie.

Renner’s fine performance as Sgt. Will James in The Hurt Locker apparently associated him in the Hollywood collective mind with American imperial muscle, and how its military servants tend to be the highly competent guys from Nowheresvilles such as Renner’s hometown of Modesto, California.

Perhaps this isn’t the real Renner, but he’s a fine enough actor to pull it off.

The Avengers obliterated Harry Potter’s opening-weekend box-office record with a total domestic take of $207 million. Including overseas receipts, its current box-office haul is over $650 million.

Remarkably, The Avengers might deserve the billion-plus it will rake in. Granted, Loki, the Wagnerian villain with a horned helmet and an Old Etonian accent who was inherited from the prequel Thor, makes a forgettable bad guy. Alan Rickman did the evil German with aristocratic English diction better in Die Hard.

Still, writer-director Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) has turned this convoluted marketing conceit—upon which hangs the fate of a decade’s worth of sequels and plastic crud merchandising—into a highly entertaining film. This is a prime cut of Big American Moviemaking. It’s funny, well-acted, and emotionally gripping (at least for its 155-minute running time; the plot had pretty much evaporated out of my skull by the time I reached the parking lot).

Hansen

I’m not known as a reliable source of racetrack tips, so if you are headed to Churchill Downs for this Saturday’s 138th running of the Kentucky Derby, please don’t take this column as advice to wager heavily on Hansen at 14 to 1 odds. In early spring, Hansen was the Derby favorite, but a horse named Dullahan dimmed his luster by catching him with a tremendous closing charge in the Bluegrass Stakes on April 14.

Yet if you’re not a betting man, if you’re the kind of race fan whose spectatorship is limited to the Derby’s two minutes per year, then Hansen, the champion two-year-old last year, is fun to root for. That’s because he’s a horse of a different color, a virtually white thoroughbred. This makes him visually distinguishable from all the bays and chestnuts, even on the backstretch.

There’s something aesthetically striking about a white horse. Both Pegasus and the unicorn were envisioned as white. History’s most audacious propaganda painting features Napoleon crossing the Alps on a white stallion. (In reality, Bonaparte, no fool, crossed Great St. Bernard Pass in 1800 on a sure-footed mule led by a trusty guide.)

Still, the interesting thing about thoroughbreds’ color is that it’s really not that interesting. Sure, some folks bet on their favorite color of horse, but that’s looked down upon by serious plungers. 

Among American humans, however, color is widely thought to be the basis of race. And everybody is interested in race. For instance, more people may have expressed an opinion on the whiteness of the four main characters in HBO’s new sitcom Girls than have watched the show. 

On the other hand, white folks, unlike everybody else, aren’t supposed to be interested in race. Hence, the popular clichés attempting to prove its impossibility (“How can anyone belong to more than one race?”) or unimportance. (“Race is only skin deep.”)

Yet as I’ve long suggested, the opposite is more true: Race is less about color than it is about your relatives, whether close or distant. Most humans find this topic intriguing. Due to how the US was settled by intercontinental voyages, skin color was a handy clue to your relations’ continental origins. Still, to think of color as the foundation of race is to put the conceptual cart before the horse.

Is color not terribly important in racing because science has proven that prejudices based on pedigree have no place at the racetrack?

Of course not. Instead, bettors and breeders don’t have to guess about a thoroughbred’s ancestry based on his color because they can look up exactly who all his forerunners have been for centuries. In England, the General Stud Book was first published in 1791, while its American equivalent dates to 1868. The thoroughbred gene pool has been thoroughly closed on both sides of the Atlantic since the 19th century.

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For instance, Hansen’s pedigree is documented back more than 20 generations to legendary forefathers such as the Darley Arabian and the Byerley Turk, whom Captain Byerley rode at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Hansen’s bloodline includes Native Dancer, the “Grey Ghost,” who became racing’s first television-era icon because he stood out on 1950s black-and-white TVs. His ancestry includes the famous 18th-century gray Alcock’s Arabian.

But Hansen’s darker progenitors are even better-known to casual fans. One of his great-great-grandfathers is Seattle Slew, the next-to-last horse to win racing’s Triple Crown. Secretariat, the supreme champion of recent times, fills two of the sixteen slots for great-great-great-grandfathers on Hansen’s inbred family tree, as does the leading modern sire, Northern Dancer, who fathered 635 registered foals. (Secretariat broke Northern Dancer’s Kentucky Derby speed record in 1973.)

A 2012 study by Irish geneticists suggests that a “speed gene” (C type myostatin gene variant) originated with an 18th century English mare and has proliferated among Northern Dancer’s progeny.

This doesn’t mean that Hansen is genetically fated to win on Saturday. The current co-favorites at 9 to 2, Union Rags and Bodemeister, share many of the same famous names in their pedigrees. They’re all distant cousins of each other by multiple genealogical pathways.

Americans tend to be freaked out by any thought of inbreeding, but it’s inevitable in any family tree, even one not officially closed like that of thoroughbreds. Just go back 40 generations in your own family tree, and you’ll find over a trillion slots to fill. Presumably, more than a few of your own precursors did double duty.

And that suggests the most efficient definition of race: A racial group is a partly inbred extended family. The inbreeding gives races more coherence and persistence than typical extended families. 

Thoroughbreds comprise a breed, which is a particular kind of race: an extended family that is becoming wholly inbred due to artificial selection.

Every human, in contrast, belongs to multiple races of varying sizes. This won’t satisfy the absolutists who say that Race Can’t Exist because people can’t belong to more than one race. In truth, when it comes to who your relatives are, it’s all relative.

Tiger Woods

The most intriguing gossip about Tiger Woods in a new tell-all book by his ex-swing coach is that at the height of his career in 2006-07, the world’s highest-paid athlete seriously considered quitting golf to take up a radically different career.

That got me thinking about neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman.

Most people have strong opinions about Woods and Zimmerman, but I want to skip all that to point out an odd similarity between them that I, an old baby boomer, find surprisingly common about youngish men born in the late 20th century.

Three years ago in Taki’s Magazine, before all of Tiger’s problems with his now ex-wife surfaced, I pointed out that Woods had become massively more muscular before our eyes in 2006-07. This was puzzling, since looking like a GI Joe action figure isn’t essential to golf. For instance, as a 24-year-old in 2000, Woods had won the US Open at Pebble Beach by a record 15 strokes while wearing a shirt that appeared several sizes too large for his then-wiry frame.

Now we finally know what the bodybuilding was about. According to insider Hank Haney’s book The Big Miss, Tiger had long been fascinated by the Navy SEAL commandos. His father Earl had been a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Special Forces, and the only thing cooler than a Green Beret is a SEAL. (Just under a year ago, SEAL Team Six assassinated Osama bin Laden.)

Around the time his father died in May 2006, Tiger transformed himself physically to see if he had what it takes to make it in the SEALs as an overage new recruit. When Woods went on a three-day paratroop training session before the 2006 US Open (in which he missed the cut), Haney unloaded on him in an email:

With the U.S. Open 18 days away, do you think it was a good idea to go on a Navy SEALs mission? You need to get that whole SEALs thing out of your system and stick to playing Navy SEAL on the video games. I can tell by the way you are talking and acting that you still want to become a Navy SEAL. Man, are you crazy?

Woods kept up his strenuous military sojourns well into 2007. Two sources told Haney that Woods’s major knee injury, which pained him so visibly during his last major championship victory, the 2008 US Open in San Diego, was suffered in one of those “kill houses” familiar from movie training montages where plywood enemies pop up to be shot.

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Or perhaps the bodybuilding was less a result of Tiger’s interest in the SEALs than a cause. (Blackwater had major problems with steroid use among its mercenaries.)

Haney compares this episode to Michael Jordan’s strange interregnum in minor-league baseball after his father’s murder (although that is often attributed these days to a purported clandestine suspension for gambling by NBA commissioner David Stern). Another analog might be movie star Mickey Rourke’s eight prizefights in the 1990s. But Pat Tillman, the strong-jawed NFL safety who patriotically enlisted in the Army after 9/11 and was killed by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan in 2004, is the most apt referent for Woods.

Tiger Woods never seemed terribly public-spirited, but it appears he seriously dreamed of risking his life to don a uniform for his country.

If Woods’s secret life resembled Act of Valor, that glossy recruiting movie for the Navy SEALS, Zimmerman’s looked more like Paul Blart: Mall Cop, the Kevin James comedy about a man deeply driven to protect and serve but who can never quite pass the State Trooper test.

Here you have the two most hated younger men in America, Tiger Woods and George Zimmerman, yet they both wanted to be of service. They wanted to protect the rest of us from bad guys. They wanted to be part of a big organization, read manuals, and get ordered around.

This is fascinating to me. Perhaps human nature doesn’t change, but fashions sure do. Back in the late 1960s, it was considered cool to be a rebel, an iconoclast, a moody loner, an antisocial misfit. At least theoretically, people were against conformity, authority, and institutions.

It wasn’t really the baby boomers who got to do all that James Dean “rebel” stuff, it was a handful of lucky bastards born just before the boom who became role models for all us dopey boomers. But we believed their self-interested spiels.

For many post-boomers, however, from the most obscure (Zimmerman) to the most famous (Woods), being part of the system is not a fear but an ambition.

Babe Ruth

Baseball season reminds us of the identity-politics group that doesn’t bark—left-handers. Why are certain aggregations of once-persecuted people such as blacks or gays so politically potent today, while others such as left-handers can be safely ignored?

Indeed, it’s almost gauche to ask why no left-handed big-leaguer has played catcher since the 1980s. More broadly, why doesn’t anybody (other than a few statistics nerds and the fathers of lefty Little Leaguers) even notice what appears to be flagrant employment discrimination based on traditional but irrational prejudices?

In contrast, the sporting press has waged a long campaign to boost the percentage of black quarterbacks in pro football. This was a push so powerful that when Rush Limbaugh mentioned its existence in 2003, he was forced from his side gig as an ESPN pre-game analyst and then blackballed from buying into an NFL franchise in 2009. (Since the first half of the last decade, the number of black passers performing well in the NFL has declined, suggesting Rush was more or less right.)

Why is the media so much more fanatical about discrimination against black quarterbacks than against left-handed catchers? Numbers alone can’t explain it. While blacks are an eighth of the country, left-handers are around a tenth. But unlike blacks at quarterback, left-handers are utterly shut out of catching.

Although catchers aren’t quite as crucial as quarterbacks, catcher Joe Maurer of the Minnesota Twins has an eight-year, $184 million contract—larger than any quarterback’s.

Like quarterbacks, catchers need to be strong-armed, tough, brave, good leaders, and smart. Just as some quarterbacks call plays (or at least audibles), catchers traditionally call pitches. (In Bull Durham, Kevin Costner plays a veteran minor-league catcher assigned to nurse Tim Robbins’s talented but stupid pitcher to the majors.) Thus, catchers are the most likely to become managers. Hence, bigotry against left-handers can close off not only a playing career, but a managerial career as well.

Neither quarterbacks nor catchers need to be fleet of foot. This means that prejudices regarding these positions are more serious because victims often can’t any play anywhere else. A lefty who is a natural catcher often has no feasible alternative position. Catcher is the baseball position where a less than supremely gifted athlete is most likely to make the majors if he’s gutty—and right-handed.

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In the majors, lefties are common in the outfield and at first base because they enjoy a significant batting advantage. By one common measure, OPS+, seven of the all-time top ten hitters have been left-handed, including the top four. In contrast, lefties are vanishingly rare at second base, shortstop, and third base because throwing to first is more awkward for them.

There are numerous theories about why catchers are always right-handed, none of them hugely persuasive. For instance, right-handed catchers can throw better to third because their arm movement is across their torsos, but a hypothetical left-handed catcher would throw better to first on pickoffs, bunts, and dribblers.

In comparison, everybody agrees that left-handers have defensive advantages at first base, yet about three-quarters of first basemen are right-handed.

But why are there no left-handed catchers?

Many other rationalizations have been proposed, none decisive. For example, Bill James argues that strong-armed left-handers are always converted to pitcher. But transforming a talented young left-handed catcher with a good but not great fastball to pitcher on the grounds that everybody knows left-handed catchers aren’t allowed in pro ball is likely dooming him to failure.

Perhaps the most plausible theory is John Walsh’s: A century ago, lefties were stereotyped as too flaky to be trusted with the main leadership position. Think of old-time lefties such as not-quite-right-in-the-head Rube Waddell, angry Ty Cobb, fun-loving Babe Ruth, comical Lefty Gomez, and the irascible Lefty Grove. Today, though, we are as likely to think of stalwart portsiders such as Stan Musial, Sandy Koufax, and Warren Spahn, who had thirteen twenty-win seasons after being wounded at the Battle of the Bulge.

Yet few care in any organized fashion about discrimination against left-handers. To garner the political heft to become what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a “sacralized” victim group, people evidently need to build solidarity along ties of race, sex, language, sexuality, or so forth. Lefties are too random to count. Thus, there is no Left-Hander History Month on PBS, no Left-Hander Studies programs at major universities, and no left-handed equivalent of Al Sharpton arguing on TV about left-handers’ rights and how the very word “rights” is a wrong against his people.

Spike Lee

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon, 2012.

The Derbyshire Affair, America’s latest Two Minutes Hate over race, provides a fresh example with which to assess social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s framework for why some people are liberal and others conservative. Although Haidt’s readable new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, does much to explain this dichotomy, he never quite articulates the most fundamental explanation.

When Haidt asked his thousand social-psychologist colleagues at their annual convention in 2011 to identify themselves politically, only three conservatives dared stand up. Haidt, however, has been shaking up his intellectually stodgy field with his evenhanded theory that liberals, libertarians, and social conservatives differ on the weights they give a half-dozen “moral foundations.”

In Haidt’s conception, liberals are the ideological descendants of John Stuart Mill, valuing “individual autonomy” über alles so long as it does no harm to anyone else. In contrast, conservatives have a broader range of concerns such as sanctity, authority, and loyalty.

I’ve converted Haidt’s various graphs to a table, with 1 representing lack of interest and 5 near-monomania:

But does this table truly describe modern American liberals? 

Consider director Spike Lee, who recently terrorized an elderly couple in Sanford, Florida by Tweeting their home address to his 265,000 followers under the mistaken impression that his racial archenemy, George Zimmerman, lived there. J. S. Mill’s influence on Spike, who has the temperament of a Jim Crow-era rabble-rouser, is unclear. Yet Spike is in no danger of being booed for trying to rouse a lynch mob when he takes his courtside seat at Madison Square Garden; everybody knows he’s a good liberal. Sure, Spike is a racist, but he’s a racist against whites, so that’s OK. It’s understood that for nonwhites, liberalism equals ethnic tribalism.

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What about white liberals? While “sanctity” didn’t mean much to J. S. Mill, is his thought the best guide to understanding the vast outpouring of rage and shock that the Derb’s advice to his kids about how to keep safe has elicited? Instead, Derbyshire is being punished for blasphemy, for articulating the secret heresies to which Americans are prey.

Haidt sometimes gets this, pointing out:

For American liberals…Anyone who blames victims for their own problems or who displays or merely excuses prejudices against sacralized victim groups can expect a vehement tribal response.

In the abstract, most liberals would say that efforts to protect children from violence aren’t wrong. But outside of The Righteous Mind, liberals (like most people) don’t think abstractly. They think in terms of “Who? Whom? Who is the designated victim group in this situation? Whose crimethink is ritually polluting us, like an untouchable’s shadow falling upon a Brahmin?”

You might imagine that potential crime victims would be a group worthy of sympathy, but they are not a “sacralized” bloc. They are just random losers. If they weren’t losers, they’d live in a better neighborhood. 

Haidt almost stumbles upon the explanation for what distinguishes liberals from conservatives when he observes:

…political scientist Don Kinder summarizes…“In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’” Political opinions function as “badges of social membership.”...Our politics is groupish, not selfish.

As Avenue Q pointed out, everybody is a little bit groupish. Yet how do individuals decide whom to be groupish about?

What Haidt never quite gets across is that conservatives typically define their groups concentrically, moving from their families outward to their communities, classes, religions, nations, and so forth. If Mars attacked, conservatives would be reflexively Earthist. As Ronald Reagan pointed out to the UN in 1987, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” (Libertarians would wait to see if the Martian invaders were free marketeers.)

In contrast, modern liberals’ defining trait is making a public spectacle of how their loyalties leapfrog over some unworthy folks relatively close to them in favor of other people they barely know (or in the case of profoundly liberal sci-fi movies such as Avatar, other 10-foot-tall blue space creatures they barely know).

As a down-to-Earth example, to root for Manchester United’s soccer team is conservative…if you are a Mancunian. If you live in Portland, Oregon, it’s liberal.

This urge toward leapfrogging loyalties has less to do with sympathy for the poor underdog (white liberals’ traditional favorites, such as soccer and the federal government, are hardly underdogs) as it is a desire to get one up in status on people they know and don’t like. 

Clarence Leon Williams and Thomas Chatterton Williams

The first time I saw the name “Trayvon Martin” was on March 16 while reading an arguable but intelligent New York Times op-ed. Entitled “As Black As We Wish to Be,” it was by Thomas Chatterton Williams, who authored Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture.

Out of the corner of my eye while reading Williams’s essay, I saw a link entitled “Charles M. Blow: Trayvon Martin.” My immediate thought was, “Oh, good, Trayvon sounds like a black name. This must be about another intelligent African-American writing or doing something interesting.”

But my brain answered back: “Nope, it’s about a Trayvon, not a Thomas Chatterton. It’s not on the sports page, so it’s going to be messed-up and miserable. And because it’s in the Times, not the Post, Trayvon’s going to be the victim, not the victimizer.”

Was that stereotyping? No doubt.

For days we were deluged with pronouncements about the evils of noticing patterns, of how white racist George Zimmerman had hunted down Trayvon solely because he stereotyped him, of how Bayesianism is tantamount to child murder.

Then it began to emerge that the real story was more ambiguous. Zimmerman turned out to be a mestizo (which is apparently an ethnicity too shameful for the press to mention). The tale slowly morphed into a dismal cross between The Bonfire of the Vanities and Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

Trayvon had tried to fit the stereotype of young black males aspiring to the thug life, picking a Twitter handle based on a rap song featuring convicted killer C-Murder. Just as Zimmerman had worried, Trayvon likely had dabbled in burglary: Martin was nabbed at his high school last fall with a backpack containing women’s jewelry and a screwdriver.

The win-win solution against stereotyping is for blacks to stop living down to their profiles.

So what can grownups do to discourage black youths from acting like knuckleheads?

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All else being equal, does naming your child after an English poet give him a better chance in life than making up some Ghetto Fabulous name to advertise your commitment to keeping it real?

That seemed to be the opinion of Williams’s father:

“Thomas Chatterton,” he’d say, addressing me by my middle name … “Do you know you wear the name of a brilliant poet, son?”

(The poet Thomas Chatterton, 1752-1770, was the original wild child. He died at 17 like Trayvon.)

The most comprehensive analysis of “The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names” was conducted by Steven D. Levitt of Freakonomics fame and the black Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr. (Charlemagne’s boon companion was named Roland and became a central figure in medieval poetry.)

Levitt and Fryer tabulated every new birth certificate in California from 1961-2000. Beginning in the black-power era of the late 1960s, black parents began bestowing an ever-increasing proportion of oppositional first names on their babies, especially girls. Unsurprisingly, these names tend to be the choices of mothers who are bad decision-makers themselves. Levitt and Fryer write:

…a woman with a [Black Name Index] equal to 100 (implying a name that no Whites have) is…31.3 percentage points more likely to have been born out-of-wedlock than a Black woman living in the same zip code with the same age and education, but carrying a name that is equally common among Whites and Blacks.

Yet Fryer and Levitt can’t find much evidence on an individual level that naming your child D’Qisykha will make her worse off than all the other problems she will inherit merely from being the daughter of somebody who might name her daughter D’Qisykha.

Still, I suspect that their analysis misses the point that culture works not only at the personal level. It’s a little like the impact of gun ownership, which is hard to track among individuals. Because of gun control, Brits get burglarized more and get in more stupid brawls, while Americans are more likely to wind up dead after a stupid brawl.

Higher-class blacks tend to give their children less self-defeating names. “Danielle” is a clever compromise that shows up three times out of the 142 names of Florida’s black 2012 National Achievement Scholars. The “D” sound is Afro-loyal, but white employers won’t automatically perceive a Danielle’s job application as a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.

This is an era almost without a generation gap, so it particularly matters what legacy parents bestow on their children. African-Americans grow up in a popular culture that constantly validates their worst instincts. Just as Charles Murray complains about upper-class whites, better-off blacks seldom give underclass blacks guidance anymore. As Thomas Chatterton Williams suggests, it’s time for some adult supervision.

(Images by Sean Tejaratchi)

Elizabeth Banks and Jennifer Lawrence

As female authors increasingly dominate popular fiction, they are confronted with whether or not to try and appeal to the remnant male market. The authors of this century’s three biggest “young adult” series (and wildly profitable movie adaptations)—Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games—have employed three different strategies.

Joanna Rowling made a boy her hero, and to fool the he-man girlz-hater element, she took the pen name J. K. Rowling. (When one of my small sons discovered that he’d been fooled into reading three books by a lady, he stopped reading Harry Potter in disgust.) Despite Rowling’s gifts, by the end of her remarkable series her most passionate fans were largely girls.

In contrast, with Twilight, the less crafty Stephenie Meyer didn’t bother, creating a woozy world of estrogen-driven emotion where Bella barely does anything except smell nice and try to make up her mind which smitten beau to choose. Twilight is the ultimate in women’s liberation, the feminine mind wholly unshackled from masculine modes of thought such as rationality.

In The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins tries to split the difference by making her protagonist a girl who fights. Collins gropes for masculine gravitas by attempting to channel her military historian father’s tales of hunting for dinner during the Depression and his nightmares from serving in Vietnam.

This has proved vastly successful. The screen adaptation of Collins’s dystopian soft sci-fi novel enjoyed a $153-million opening weekend, the third-highest ever. And more than just fanatical tween girls turned out. The opening-weekend crowd was two-fifths male, double that of the last Twilight installment. A majority of the audience was over age 25, and the grown-ups gave the movie a CinemaScore rating of A.

Critics are raving, especially over how Katniss Everdeen is a strong, empowered female character. Political pundits are competing to interpret The Hunger Games as a Democrat or Republican allegory.

So what is the film about?

The Hunger Games addresses today’s most burning social issues: Would a reality-TV show that forces boys and girls to hunt down and slaughter each other with edged weapons be a good idea? Should America switch to a totalitarian dictatorship in which the decadent Capitol economically exploits the twelve starving Districts and annually demands two children from each as “tributes” to compete in “Hunger Games” where 23 of the 24 will die horribly?

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When you stop to think about it, is televised child butchery actually a bad thing?

We are all entitled to our opinions on this complex subject, but I admire how this film comes down forthrightly on the Bad Idea side of the ledger. Former Clinton speechwriter-turned-director Gary Ross (Seabiscuit) doesn’t pull any punches as he shoots innumerable close-ups of starlet Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) scrunching up her baby-fat-laden features to convey unhappiness—even sadness—at having to participate in an underage bloodbath.

The reason for all the different theories about the movie’s subtext is because it doesn’t have one.

I’m not measuring The Hunger Games against, say, Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation or J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. No, The Hunger Games is brain-dead compared merely to last year’s Transformers 3.

Granted, the idea of a mortal-combat show sounds like a slam dunk, which is why there have been so many other movies with the same premise (such as The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger).

The Hunger Games could have been a terrific satire on modern sports or video games if Collins had ever paid attention to either. We’ve been enthralled by quarterback Peyton Manning coming back to the NFL for $96 million after four neck surgeries. The fact that Manning might end up in a wheelchair for life makes the whole story more dramatic. Or imagine how much wrestling mogul Vince McMahon could amuse us if the government ordered him to kill people in pursuit of higher ratings.

Unfortunately, “game theory” is a male concept entirely alien to Collins.

The movie would be far more horrifying if viewers had to figure out for themselves that The Hunger Games were a fight to the death. But that would demand too much of the audience. Instead, the film is an earnest and leaden production with witless, on-the-nose dialogue. The only incisive scenes feature Donald Sutherland as the evil President of Panem. As it turns out, the white-bearded actor made them up himself.

Hollywood is always being accused of dumbing down the American public, but in reality, movie folks waste some of their potential profits smartening up their films for their own enjoyment. The Hunger Games’ success shows how low the audience would go.

Damsels in Distress

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 WASP Woody Allen.”

Stillman, who wrote for The American Spectator when young, developed a cult following among some rightist intellectuals because of his out-of-the-closet political and cultural conservatism.

Even more unusual in romantic comedies is his ethnic and class loyalty. At least since The Graduate, privileged Protestant characters have been the default bad guys who always lose the girls to the spunky outsiders. But Stillman, the godson of Princeton sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, who popularized the term “WASP,” took a pedantic pride in his country-club caste’s genteel virtues. As one Upper East Side youth notes in Metropolitan:

The term ‘bourgeois’ has almost always been one of contempt. Yet it is precisely the bourgeoisie that is responsible, well, for nearly everything good in the world for the last four centuries. Do you know the French film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”? When I first heard that title I thought, finally, someone is going to tell the truth about the bourgeoisie. What a disappointment.

Stillman followed up with two more movies in which People Like Us are the good guys. In Barcelona, two Reaganites joust with leftist Euro-weenies during the Cold War: “I think it’s well-known that anti-Americanism has its roots in sexual impotence.…” And in the The Last Days of Disco, when Chris Eigeman’s nightclub flunky is accused of being a yuppie, he retorts: “I wish we were yuppies. Young, upwardly mobile, professional. Those are good things, not bad things.”

Since 1990, however, the indefatigable Woody Allen—who famously claimed that eighty percent of success is showing up—has released twenty-one films versus the defatigable Stillman’s three. Finally, though, Stillman’s first movie in almost fourteen years,  Damsels in Distress, will be arriving with April’s flowers. It’s a sunny, strange, and occasionally exquisite comedy about four sorority sisters with floral names: Violet, Rose, Heather, and Lily. “You probably think we’re frivolous, empty-headed, perfume-obsessed college coeds,” says their self-critical leader Violet (Greta Gerwig). “You’re probably right.”

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In anybody else’s collegiate comedy, they’d be the mean girls, but Stillman makes them his heroines as they battle a campus suicide epidemic by teaching the lovelorn to tap dance: “Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Prevention is nine-tenths the cure?’ Well, in the case of suicide, it’s actually ten-tenths.” Earnest, eccentric, and old-fashioned, Violet is as intensely opinionated as only young people without much experience can be. Yet she also has a little of Stillman’s self-aware sadness.

Stillman’s perspective is a cross between Jane Austen’s level-headed moralism and the absurdism of Lewis Carroll  and Oscar Wilde, who delighted in elaborate manners as almost abstract works of art. Stillman was married for 22 years and has two daughters. But as with two other high-class conservative icons, Evelyn Waugh and William F. Buckley, his canon can seem a bit, well, gay. A boy in whom Violet is interested explains to her that his term paper for their English class, “Flit Lit: The Dandy in Literature,” is about the decline of decadence:

Before, homosexuality was something refined, hidden, sublimated, aspiring to the highest forms of expression and often achieving them. Now it just seems to be a lot of muscle-bound morons running around in T-shirts.

When a worried Violet asks, “Are you gay?” he replies, “Not especially, but in another era, it would have had more appeal. Now, I just don’t see the point.”

While not quite as delightful as Woody’s Midnight in Paris, Stillman’s first movie since 1998 is better than most of the thirteen films Allen has directed in the meantime. I liked it a lot, but it’s hard to convey the film’s tone. Fortunately, the two-minute trailer does a fine job of letting you figure out if this film is for you.

Why hadn’t Stillman made a movie in this century? Judging by how often his movies are about depression (or, as Violet explains, “I don’t like the word ‘depressed.’ I prefer to say that I’m in a tailspin”), perhaps he’s been a little blue. His theme from Metropolitan about WASPs losing their energy may have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Moreover, obtaining financing for his various screenplays has been a problem since the failure of Disco, with its $8-million budget. (Damsels cost $3 million.) While Woody Allen has been helped through his long dry spells by investors who admire what he represents, rich WASPs would apparently never dream of investing in Whit Stillman movies as an expression of ethnic pride.

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 Hunting, “a couple of dudes ran up from behind, punched me in the head, then kicked me a couple of times before running off” without stealing anything. This shameful attack happened merely a mile from the US Capitol Building.

Four decades ago, a popular witticism was that a conservative was “a liberal who got mugged the night before.” Today, the rules of crimethink have grown rigid enough that even getting mugged doesn’t seem to have put much of a dent in Yglesias’s worldview, judging from his new e-book The Rent Is Too Damn High.

This is a downloadable file priced at $3.99 for what’s in effect a long magazine article without the slick graphics that would accompany, say, an Atlantic  cover story. Yglesias offers a lucid technocratic argument against the ever-growing web of government regulations—zoning, environmental, preservationist, and parking—that retard the construction of apartment buildings, especially high-rises, in America’s most desirable locations, even in Yglesias’s beloved native Manhattan.

Iglesias seems to think that if only real estate developers were freed to Build, Baby, Build, we would enjoy a low-rent golden age.

Like David Brooks, Yglesias is a member of what might jokingly be called the Shadow Steveosphere: public intellectuals who find themselves both intrigued and troubled by my contention that public discussion of the patterns we all notice in our daily lives should inform even the most august policy debates.

Much of The Rent Is Too Damn High is thus influenced by my articles on affordable family formation: how the increasing cost of the old American Dream of a home in a decent school district discourages marriage among all but the upper middle class. Hence, I’m sympathetic and mostly impressed. 

Still, the fundamental reason that Yglesias’s white progressive friends will never pay more than lip service to his policy prescription is so palpable—but goes largely unstated in his e-book—that The Rent Is Too Damn High is most interesting as a symptom of the growing emasculation of intellectual discourse. 

Consider gentrifier’s guilt. This is the oft-expressed complaint among affluent whites moving into DC’s once-black neighborhoods that the diversity that attracted them in the first place is disappearing, and that, really, something ought to be done about it before every black household in Washington, other than maybe the Obamas, has moved to Baltimore. 

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Yglesias comes to their rescue with a logical solution for his friends’ laments (and with a Harvard degree in philosophy, he’s good at logic): There’s room in the sky for everybody! Presumably, those guys who brutalized Yglesias could have a cheap 47th-floor apartment with a killer view of the National Mall.

And what about the School Achievement Gap? 

But we only rarely ask why it is that poor families can’t afford to move to nice suburbs. It’s not because construction costs are higher in the suburbs. It’s because it’s frequently illegal to build the kind of dense apartment buildings that could accommodate lower-income families.

Just think how these good schools will be able to salve their scholastic goodness all over the poor children who have moved into the new Blade Runner-like tower blocks in once exclusive suburbs.

It’s easy to make up other reasons for implementing the Yglesias Plan, such as the Obesity Crisis. As you may have noticed, the typical resident of high-rent places such as San Francisco, Santa Monica, and Park Slope is more slender than the diabetic denizens of Nowheresville. It’s a national tragedy that the poor slobs can’t afford to move to Georgetown, Cambridge, Palo Alto, or Aspen.

And what about the 165 million foreigners who according to the Gallup Poll want to immigrate to America? Have you noticed that “if the Golden State were as dense on average as New Jersey over 188 million people would live there?” Think how much global carbon emissions would be reduced by importing vast numbers of Third Worlders and stacking them high. (We wouldn’t have to worry about them trying to get away, would we? Mexicans love high-rises, public transportation, and vegetable oil-powered Priuses, and they hate exurban sprawl and gas-guzzling pickup trucks, right?) 

So why haven’t nice, well-educated white liberals told the hinterlands to give them their tired, their poor, their Size XXXL masses yearning to live cheap? Why instead have they erected countless roadblocks to cheap housing?

Because the trouble with living in a low-rent neighborhood is having low-rent neighbors. 

Therefore, most of the bugs that the Yglesias Plan intends to fix are instead its features.

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 Census Bureau projected that America’s Hispanic population would increase by 66 million from 2000 to 2050. So far, though, there’s scant evidence that they will have much impact on elites other than as affirmative-action tokens. 

The big news in this century has been the growing Asian-white test-score gap at the high end.

Consider a feature article in The New York Times over the weekend, “To Be Black at Stuyvesant High.” It was seemingly commissioned to argue for admissions quotas at the famously competitive Manhattan public high school by pointing out that only 3.6 percent of Stuyvesant’s students are now black or Hispanic, down from 15 percent in 1970. My guess is that the story’s emphasis on a lonely black student was mostly an elaborate framing device for its more interesting but unspoken message: Holy God, look at ALL THE ASIANS!

Stuyvesant’s Asian fraction has grown over four decades from six percent to 72.5 percent. The whites who comprise a large majority of New York Times subscribers have seen their share plummet from 79 percent to 24 percent.

A similar pattern can be seen among the top “one percent” on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test for high-school juniors. Although the National Merit Scholarship Corporation appears reluctant to discuss its honorees’ ethnic makeup, industrious individuals can examine National Merit semifinalists’ names on its state-by-state press releases. The NMSC doesn’t post these lists online, but some obsessive souls at College Confidential have tracked down a couple dozen here.

For example, California is allotted 1950 semifinalists this year. A reader of mine whose screen name is “Rec1man” counted 974 Northeast Asian surnames and 184 South Asian surnames. Although Asians comprise only 13 percent of California’s population, three-fifths of the state’s National Merit Scholarship semifinalists have Asian last names. (This doesn’t count those with Western surnames who no doubt have East Asian Tiger Mothers.) A breakdown of the previous year’s winners proves this isn’t a onetime fluke.

(Surname analysis is not foolproof on the individual level, of course. Much to the surprise of some of his South Boston constituents, Senator John F. Kerry (D-MA) was discovered in 2003 to have no Irish in him. And what about “first-name analysis?” I looked for scholars with monikers such as D’Quisha or D’Sqhan, but nobody with an apostrophe qualified.)

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In California, 40 semifinalists are named “Lee,” which could be Chinese, Korean, white, or black. Rec1man assumes they are all East Asian, which can’t be far off: “Smith” and “Jones” are more common among white and black Americans than “Lee,” but they account for only one California semifinalist.

Another conundrum lies in distinguishing Spanish-surnamed Filipinos from Latinos. Overall, though, that’s insignificant because there are only a few dozen Spanish-surnamed California semifinalists. In general, the state’s Filipinos score about as well as whites on various tests, although they lack the math turbocharging seen among other East Asians.

The Northeast Asians and Indians dominate the semifinalist ranks so thoroughly that other groups are pushed into statistical insignificance. For example, California has a sizable and prosperous Armenian community, but only four kids whose names end with “-ian” or “-yan” qualified. In contrast, there are 40 Korean “Kims.”

Interestingly, in California, whites average slightly higher than Asians on the high-stakes SAT. Perhaps whites see little incentive to study for the low-stakes PSAT unless they hope to score in the top few percentiles, while the Tiger Moms see the PSAT as an important checkpoint in a multi-year ordeal of SAT prep.

One reason for Asian dominance in public-school testing could be that upscale whites often pony up for private schools, while Asians tend to congregate at a handful of taxpayer-supported schools in Silicon Valley, Orange County, and the San Gabriel Valley.

Together, the National Merit lists and the mandatory STAR/CST tests of all public-school students cast useful light on the emerging competition between Chinese and Indians. 

Rec1man observes that in top California suburbs such as Santa Clara County, Indians score about as well as the Chinese. Statewide, the Chinese are ahead, although both groups are well in front of whites.

Much like back home in Asia, Chinese performance appears to be more consistent, while Indians are divided by caste. Although only a tiny fraction of India’s population is South Indian Brahmin, Rec1man estimates from surnames that over half of California’s Indian semifinalists are from this caste.

Two major questions remain: Do these outsized Asian elite scores represent higher intelligence, better work ethic, more conniving test preparation, or some combination of all three? And if innate intelligence proves to be a factor, how long will policymakers be able to continue denying it?

Anthony Quinn

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 countless racial lists, such as Oscar nominees, to count subversively. 

The funniest footnote in Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart is where he documents his assertion that the movie industry openly proclaims its liberalism with:

Source: almost any Academy Awards show.

Yet Hollywood applies its own diversity rules selectively. For instance, blacks matter. Every few years, the Oscar season is wracked with controversies over whether blacks (or less often, women) are getting their fair share of statuettes. A year ago, there was a fuss over how not a single black had been nominated.

Blacks have been nominated 60 times for Oscars in the four acting categories, so the quibbles have grown more meta. This year, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer are in the running for The Help, but that raises second-order controversies about whether we should be comfortable with black actresses playing maids.

And why have black leading ladies been nominated only half as often as black leading men? Is Hollywood saying black women are less attractive?

Black achievement in less glamorous Oscar categories has been more modest, but that doesn’t raise much interest. For example, after blacks garnered seven Best Score nominations from 1961-1987, none has been nominated in almost a quarter-century. (That might imply that black musical competence has been declining in the hip-hop age, but nobody wants to talk about that.)

Yet the most striking diversity shortfall in Hollywood is one that would get any less liberal industry in trouble with Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Los Angeles County is about half Hispanic, and Latino fans make up 30% of the enthusiasts for summer blockbusters. Despite all that, Mexican Americans—meaning those who have spent at least part of their formative years in America—are remarkably underrepresented in The Industry. 

Wikipedia’s Oscar lists suggest that no Mexican American has been nominated in any category, no matter how humble, since the 1980s. 

Oddly enough, Mexican Americans did better in the pre-diversity days, receiving five acting nominations from 1952 through 1964. Granted, one went to Susan Kohner, daughter of a Mexican silent-film actress who married her Jewish producer.

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But Anthony Quinn, who was born in Mexico and raised in Boyle Heights, was closer to the real deal. He won Supporting Actor Oscars for playing the brother of the Mexican revolutionary in 1952’s Viva Zapata! and for playing Paul Gauguin in 1956’s Lust for Life. The studio publicity department stylized him as half-Irish; in truth, three of his grandparents were born in Mexico and only one in Ireland.

That Quinn was a mestizo made him more valuable in Hollywood, since he could plausibly play a huge range of races, from Indian chiefs to Greek fishermen to Bedouin sheiks to Ukrainian popes. If you wanted to make a mainstream movie about, say, Eskimos, you could always put famous Oscar-winning movie star Anthony Quinn in your lead role.

But as the number of Mexican Americans has mounted to over 30 million, their Oscar recognition has dwindled. The last Mexican American nominee was Edward James Olmos as calculus teacher Jaime Escalante in 1988’s Stand and Deliver. Gregory Nava is the only Mexican American screenwriter given a nod, for El Norte in 1983. John A. Alonzo was nominated for Chinatown’s superb cinematography in 1974.

A growing number of honorees are alumni of Mexico City’s film and television industry, such as Emmanuel Lubezki, nominated for filming Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, or Demián Bichir, who received a surprise Best Actor nod for playing an illegal-immigrant gardener in Chris Weitz’s box-office flop A Better Life. 

But there hasn’t been an American-raised Oscar nominee of Mexican descent for 23 years, unless you want to count Susan Kohner’s sons, the Weitz Brothers, who were nominated for writing About a Boy in 2002. But though their 101-year-old actress grandmother was born in Mexico, Chris and Paul Weitz aren’t exactly representative Mexican Americans. Their Berlin-born Jewish father was the late John Weitz—fashion designer, racecar driver, best-selling novelist, yachtsman, spy, and dandy.

Hollywood types appear to assume that since they are by definition Nice, they are immune to being smeared with Not Nice terms such as “disparate impact.” That the Hollywood craft unions remain nepotistically white isn’t a problem for them. Nor do they feel guilty to insist ambitious young people must intern without pay, which discriminates against Latinos, who tend to hate working for free. While blacks and gays are lavished with attention, Mexican Americans remain the Academy’s invisible people.