San Francisco, CA

The Stork Scenario

Some rare good news out of San Francisco: Rookie wide receiver Ricky Pearsall of the NFL 49ers has already been released from the hospital after being shot through the torso during an attempted mugging on Saturday afternoon at Geary Street and Grant Avenue, a block from Union Square, the ...

Harlem women, circa 1925

Migration Nation

While reading a new study by Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt, Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery, about how it is better for African Americans today to be descended from ancestors who were freed before slavery and/or lived after the Civil War in the north or upper south rather than ...

High Spirits

During an unusual stretch in United States history in which many of the candidates for national office, such as Donald Trump, Tim Walz, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, and George W. Bush, have been teetotalers, Kamala Harris is restoring American political tradition by finding joy in the ...

Kamala Harris

Indian Summer

Kamala Harris’ fabulous career has of course benefited extraordinarily from her being roughly one-quarter black, but few have offered much of an opinion on her being one-half Tamil Brahmin (besides her fellow South Asians, of course), other than it reduces her despised white component. And yet, ...

Kamala Harris

One Drop Ruse

About three decades ago, California political legend Willie Brown introduced Donald Trump to his latest mistress, Kamala Harris, when Trump gave Willie and his entourage a lift on his jet so he could ask advice from the expert himself on how to get around California’s notorious regulators on a ...

The Fast and the Curious

Merely three years after I revealed here in Taki’s Magazine that both the Ferguson Effect of the mid-2010s and the Floyd Effect of the 2020s had driven up not just homicides but also traffic fatalities, The New York Times has gotten around to noticing that the recent big increase in driving ...

Alger Hiss, 1950

Red Scare

I considered writing about presidential politics, but the way things are going lately, by the time you read this on Wednesday, we may well be on to a whole new storyline I can’t anticipate. So, I’m going to go off topic and reflect on a new paper by two economists about an early example of ...

J.D. Vance

What if I’m Right?: Redux

This week’s dramatic events—Trump surviving being wounded by a would-be assassin quickly followed by his selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate—will focus attention on the newer generation of higher-brow rightist thinkers because it’s now thinkable that Vance, whose first ...

Diversity Up, Fertility Down?

The U.S. total fertility rate briefly exceeded the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman’s lifetime during the Housing Bubble of 2006–2007 but has since dropped steadily, hitting a new record low of 1.62 in 2023. Total births fell 2 percent last year to under 3.6 million, the lowest total ...

New York, September 11

Trust, but Verify

If the mainstream media won’t tell you the truth about the President’s age-driven mental decline until forced to spill the beans by a debate on live TV, can you trust them not to try to mislead you about other things as well? No, of course not. Does that also mean that if they misdirect you ...