To have been born in the USA in 1946 was to have been dealt aces in the poker game of life. Those born in the first year of the baby boom went through their days finding that there were relatively few older men born during the Depression and The War to hog the leadership roles and an abundance of ...
Tár is a strong art-house drama for older audiences about a #MeToo scandal in the arts that cleverly buys itself the right to be moderately sympathetic toward its ultimately canceled protagonist because writer-director Todd Field has made her not a straight white male but the lesbian conductor of ...
What if I’m right about how the world works? What policies would that imply? My basic insight is that the world actually is pretty much what it looks like, loath as we may be to admit it. When it comes to human behavior, there mostly aren’t systematic differences between what your lying eyes ...
With the World Cup starting this Sunday, I realized that after decades of complaining, I’ve finally made my peace with soccer. Like many Americans, I always felt that the world’s most popular sport was kind of lame. Granted, it was fun to play even if you weren’t any good, and the World ...
Unlike you, who are reading this column on Wednesday, while writing it I didn’t have a clue what happened in Tuesday’s elections. Then again, owing to how election-counting has slowed over the years due to the disinvention of the computer or whatever, you may not either. But you probably are ...
With elections a few days away, crime statistics are finally being widely discussed in the press. So...I’m not going to pass up one last chance to deluge you with new graphs based on the CDC’s WONDER database of causes of death. Democratic politicians have been flailing about looking for a way ...
With an election coming up, various well-known Democrats haven’t been able to keep themselves from arguing with me on Twitter about crime statistics, which tends to be an imprudent idea. For example, David Simon, creator of the famous TV show about black crime in Baltimore, The Wire, has been ...
Ali G: [Explaining his business idea] What is the most popular thing in the world? Donald Trump: [Ponders the question, then decisively finds the right answer] Music. G: [After a long pause] No. Trump: [Bored] Tell me. G: Ice cream! Trump: Okay... Because music may well be the most popular thing in ...
The so-far triumphant transgender movement is a political coalition that includes two polar opposite sets of allies who are so radically different in their thought styles that they can’t even begin to understand each other: naive nice moms and smart but not-at-all nice nerdy ex-men. The ...
The rise and fall of fame—or at least of the number of times books mention the name of an artist or other historical figure—can be conveniently graphed using Google’s free Ngram Viewer. Google has digitized the contents of 129 million books. Ngram lets you look up how relatively frequently a ...
