Curious little article here in The New York Times: “Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look.” The tainted history of using biology to explain criminal behavior has pushed criminologists to reject or ignore genetics and concentrate on social causes: miserable poverty, corrosive addictions, guns. Now ...
I was tempted to have a flutter on the Belmont Stakes last weekend. Not that I’m much of a horseracing fan. It’s only that I’ve been feeling exceptionally idle lately. When in this frame of mind, my instinctive response to the prospect of starting a day’s work at my desk is to put off the ...
Did you know that four percent of the US population—one in 25 of us—are now “cancer survivors”? This I read in TIME magazine’s current issue, whose cover story concerns what John Wayne called “the Big C.” That means twelve million of us are entitled to wear one of those twisty colored ...
I spent the Memorial Day weekend as a guest of Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Property and Freedom Society at their annual conference in Bodrum, Turkey. It was a wonderfully relaxing break, for which I am very much obliged to the good professor, his charming wife, and their co-organizers. I gave ...
You think the 2012 Republican field is lackluster? Check out these party animals. The “party” in that last sentence is the Chinese Communist Party. The gents standing in the picture are the aptly named Standing Committee (changwu weiyuanhui, literally “everyday affairs ...
You think the 2012 Republican field is lackluster? Check out these party animals. The “party” in that last sentence is the Chinese Communist Party. The gents standing in the picture are the aptly named Standing Committee (changwu weiyuanhui, literally “everyday affairs ...
Do you know anything about Yemen? No, me neither. Hang on, let me do a little checking at the CIA World Factbook. Here we go. Size: a tad bigger than Spain. Mostly desert, only 2.9 percent arable land. Population: 24 million plus, squinched in between Taiwan and North Korea in the world rankings. ...
A toast, ladies and gentlemen, to Mr. Shailendra Kumar Upadhyay of Nepal, who shuffled off this mortal coil on Monday afternoon at age 82. Mr. Upadhyay was at 18,700 feet above sea level when he turned in his lunch pail, most of the way up Mount Everest. He was trying for the summit in hopes of ...
There was a good crowd at New York University Tuesday evening for the Intelligence Squared debate. These are full-dress formal disputations on topics of public interest, held roughly once a month through the season, very professionally organized and broadcast on Bloomberg TV and ...
The politicians are beginning to shuffle into place for next year’s presidential contest. (Or out of place: Haley Barbour announced this week that he won’t try for the Republican nomination.) So whom do we have? We have Barack Obama. I see no sign that anyone in his own party will ...
