Alma Mater Blotter

What's the worst college in America in terms of taking in kids from rich families and turning out young adults who, despite all their privileges, still won"€™t earn very much? By one way of counting, the biggest loser is Middlebury College in the Vermont ski country, site of the recent Charles ...

Afghanistan, Then and Now

With America's 16-year-old war in Afghanistan back in the news as Defense Secretary James Mattis hints that he"€™ll be sending in perhaps 4,000 more U.S. troops, Brad Pitt's new movie on Netflix, War Machine, could be of interest. Pitt plays a lightly fictionalized version of "€œObama's ...

The Secret History of the 21st Century

The insightful blogger who goes by the moniker Spotted Toad has created a series of charts explaining the 2016 Electoral College results as a result of average home price in each state. The pattern is much the same as it has been in every election since 2000: In states where younger white people ...

What if Charles Murray Is Right?

The extraordinary decline in the cost of sequencing a whole human genome, from $10 million in 2008 to $1,400 by late 2015, means that in the coming years science will almost certainly be able to answer the Charles Murray question: Are some of the gaps in average IQ among the races at least partly ...

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

What if Charles Murray is right? What if some of the various racial gaps in cognitive performance are due to genetics? Would that be the end of the world? It is considered appropriate to hyperventilate as if you believe so. On the other hand, what if Murray is wrong and his best critic, James ...

Laurence Olivier

Who’s Afraid of Whom?

Increasingly, social-grievance jihadis are getting themselves worked up over casting decisions in movies, TV shows, plays, and even operas, labeling anything they disapprove of as "€œwhitewashing."€ Granted, the number of beneficiaries of disputes over which celebrities will get which roles ...

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University

Dumb and Dumber

Are campus leftists getting dumber? It sure seems that way. For example, a black activist stabbed four students yesterday at the University of Texas, murdering one. That's just kind of vile and moronic. The trend is the reverse of a half century ago when the radicals tended to outwit the ...

More Hysterics on Campus

Lately, American higher education is notoriously prone to tantrums. Two more academic meltdowns last week raise connected questions: First, are scholars allowed to suggest any explanation for racial disparities other than that White People Are Bad? Second, if they can"€™t say anything heretical ...

Hogwarts School

Hogwash 101

American academia markets itself as progressive if not downright radical. For example, here's a self-description by an assistant professor of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College: She intervenes in popular visual media like reality television to interrogate how time moves and for whom to ...

Benjamin Franklin

Living Large No Longer

Just as the 21st century has witnessed the paradox of the rhetoric of white privilege and the reality of white death, we"€™ve also seen increasing black privilege, but with the benefits flowing mostly to the whitest of blacks. The ongoing flight from white helps those blacks who are almost but ...