I recently unfairly baited the great baseball statistics thinker Bill James into responding at vast length to one of my snarky tweets, which got me thinking about what we could learn from baseball history about how the media often gets The Narrative wrong. The intellectual rigor of baseball ...
In contrast to Angela Saini’s acclaimed but dismal 2019 work of science denialism, Superior: The Return of Race Science, Adam Rutherford’s 2020 book How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality benefits from Rutherford’s lively prose style. The British science writer likes ...
The energetic media tycoon Ezra Klein has a book out titled Why We’re Polarized. Spoiler alert: One reason is because too many people watch Fox News instead of reading Klein’s properties like Vox. Another cause is because somebody imprudently spilled the beans to “white Christians” that ...
In the middle of August 1982, I was unemployed and looking for a job in New York City. A friend from MBA school called to say he could get me an interview at his Wall Street firm, J.P. Morgan. But Wall Street work was not a gold mine in 1982 because the stock market had been in the doldrums since ...
Social scientists tend to be leftists, but the bulk of their findings have long tended to support rightists. Charles Murray, a rare man of the right in the social sciences, has been pointing out this paradox since his 1984 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. Now 77, Murray ...
A couple of heavyweight conservative thinkers, Charles Murray and Christopher Caldwell, have important new books out this month: Murray’s upcoming Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class and Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Caldwell, a distinguished ...
2019 turned out to be a good year for quality guy movies after all, as several veteran directors ignored the anti-male zeitgeist and just shot the films they’ve long wanted to make, such as Joker, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, The Irishman, and Ford v Ferrari. Sam Mendes, for example, delivers ...
One oddity of discourse is that novel phrases seem more likely to catch on if their meanings are opaque than if they are self-evident. Having to know a semisecret code makes phrases such as “motte and bailey argument” more popular, not less. For example, as a term for when something passes its ...
The umpteenth remake of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s witty 1868 girls’ novel about growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, during the Civil War, is directed by Greta Gerwig and stars her alter ego, the lovely Irish lass Saoirse Ronan, as Jo March. As with the five sisters of Jane Austen’s ...
Richard Jewell is director Clint Eastwood’s well-acted, solidly scripted biopic about the racial-profiling fiasco that undermined the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing investigation. The FBI monomaniacally targeted an innocent rent-a-cop for being a Frustrated White Man, and then leaked his name to ...
