What I love about travel (and you probably do too) is how often it confirms stereotypes, even ones I didn’t know but ought to have guessed. In this case, I just got back from the booming Spokane, Washington–Coeur d’Alene, Idaho region, towns I’d never been to before. I’m amused by how ...

How can we explain the varying wealth of nations? This question has long elicited a wealth of notions. Thus, in my quarter century as a book reviewer, I’ve always been a sucker for taking on ambitious theory-and-history-of-everything books such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, ...

Is there a shadowy network of Democrat pedophiles plotting to legalize sex with children? I’ve been hearing that for the past half-dozen years, but to be honest, I don’t see much evidence of any kind of powerful campaign to make child sex abuse the next big thing after gay marriage and ...

In the 1970s, the Harvard biology department was for life scientists like what Los Alamos in the 1940s had been for physicists: an assemblage of the great names, but with even more clashes of personality and politics. The distinguished science journalist Richard Rhodes, author of the famous 1986 ...

The 1940s, when so many new technologies such as atomic weapons and computers were rushed into existence, remains the peak real-life science-fiction decade. So there’s a steady demand from highbrow readers for biographies of the various Manhattan Project superheroes. The latest is The Man ...

Dr. Albert Bourla, CEO of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, has published a new memoir entitled Moonshot: Inside Pfizer’s Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible.  While the revolutionary mRNA vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech has not turned out to be as much of a panacea as hoped, for ...

It’s foolish to speculate about the future course of a war, but three weeks into Mr. Putin’s War, it’s evident that Russia’s Plan A laid an egg. Apparently, Plan A was, more or less, to win a stunning, virtually bloodless victory in the vein of Russia’s Little Green Men taking over ...

Back in the days when a proper meal for a Supreme Court justice was a steak, a baked potato, a couple of shots of bourbon, and a cigar, nominees to this lifetime job weren’t expected to last all that long. For instance, Harry Truman’s four picks spent an average of only eleven years on the ...

Out of understandable frustration with their countrymen, Americans increasingly assert that if their own side fails to win the current domestic political struggle, the United States of America, history’s mightiest country, should (and/or must) break up into separate sovereign territories. After ...

When it was suggested that I review the new nonfiction book The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman, I assumed he would be an ideal analyst of that distant decade because, after all, he’d written that very 1990s novel Fight Club, hadn’t he? But it turns out that was by Chuck Palahniuk, which shows you ...