How high of a standard of living did young baby boomers enjoy, especially those of us fortunate to grow up on the then lightly populated West Coast? That question kept coming to mind while reading the acclaimed 2015 memoir of a youth spent at the beach in California and Hawaii, Barbarian Days: A ...

Mexico’s establishment party got kicked to the curb in Sunday’s election, winning only 16 percent of the vote, which should remind us that we are constantly told two rather contradictory things about immigration from Latin America: —First, immigrants are pouring in from the banana republics ...

What proportion of the top creative artists in Hollywood, the heavyweight auteurs, are men of the right? This old question has come up again with the box office triumph of the anti-egalitarian Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 and the comments about Donald Trump by David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks ...

Once the reelected Obama administration gave the okay for the diversity industry to begin shaking down Silicon Valley like it does everybody else, we began to read over and over that the reason there are few female tech founders is because the white male power structure leaves billion-dollar bills ...

A new contender in the war of books over the implications of the onrushing discoveries in genetics is the exhaustive 656-page She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer, winner of the 2016 Stephen Jay Gould Prize. Zimmer, who is more or less ...

The deaths this month of literary giants Tom Wolfe, age 88, and Philip Roth, 85, illuminated a little-noticed divide in American life. The two writers were fairly comparable combinations of talent, energy, ambition, and personality, so it’s instructive to see how their reputations ...

A year ago, after a decade of worsening pain from swinging hard since infancy, Tiger Woods, perhaps the highest-paid athlete in history, appeared headed for the same fate as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Prince, and Tom Petty. But this spring Woods is grinding away again on tour, playing surprisingly ...

Although we are constantly told by white intellectuals that race does not exist, the most remarkable aspect of the American system of racial affirmative action is that it works—and surprisingly smoothly—on the honor system. You might assume that if race were an arbitrary social construct, ...

Jonathan Weisman, a mid-level New York Times staffer and author of the short but repetitious new book (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump, is not a particularly acute thinker. But his unoriginality makes his (((Semitism))) a revealing distillation of the conventional wisdom ...

Can 2018’s tsunami of DNA data on the origins of human biodiversity help explain the puzzle of why Americans tend to equate “diversity” with Africans, especially West Africans? Anthropology has always been assumed to have political implications. For example, in Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire ...