Thinking of England

Due to the vagaries of the lunar calendar, the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin is either just past us or coming up in late April. In either case, today is a convenient occasion for trying to put Irish history into some sort of long-term perspective. The 1916 attempted nationalist ...

Racial Ratios

Earlier this month, John Rivers tweeted out his hope for the future: I dream of a world where a mid­level manager in a mid­level company can accurately quote FBI crime statistics on Facebook and not be fired. We don"€™t live in that utopia, however, so you should be cautious about mentioning ...

The American Hitler or the American Netanyahu?

Staying up all Monday night to write a column for publication Wednesday morning is a tricky business when elections fall on a Tuesday. So let me offer four longer-term perspectives. First, Hispandering. While we still have Marco Rubio to kick around some more, let's ponder just how badly the ...

Rhetorical Momentum

Last week, Hillary Clinton tweeted a line from her South Carolina primary victory speech:"€œInstead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers. We need to show that we really are all in this together."€ "€”Hillary in SC Because the Democratic front-runner was clearly referring ...

Plaques for Blacks

Last week, I pointed out that the social sciences were suffering from mirror-image problems: the much-publicized Replication Crisis, in which academics announce trivial findings that turn out to be not reproducible, and the less-discussed Repetition Crisis, in which the only explanations for ...

The Replication Crisis and the Repetition Crisis

With data becoming ever more abundant, this should be the golden age of the social sciences. And yet they seem to be suffering two mirror-image nervous breakdowns"€”the Replication Crisis and the Repetition Crisis. Outright made-up-data fraud is hardly unknown in academia, but the double ...

The Ultimate Minority Right

In recent weeks, I kept meaning to write up a stylized history of the evolution of political ideology over recent centuries. But my examples"€”why Andrew Jackson rather than Alexander Hamilton will get booted off the currency, how Spike Lee learned painfully to start denouncing Hollywood for ...

Alexander Hamilton: Honorary Nonwhite

A simple model that helps make much about the modern world easier to comprehend is that of a high-low tag team against the middle. As part of a time-tested strategy of divide and rule, the rich tend to push for policies and attitudes that increase identity-politics divisiveness"€”more ...

Spike Lee

The Oscar Grouches

Back in August in my review of Straight Outta Compton, I predicted that the rap biopic was likely to cause a racial controversy for the Academy Awards because, while the movie wasn"€™t quite good enough to earn much Oscar love, it was competent enough to trigger feelings of entitlement. As last ...

Diversity vs. Solidarity

The upcoming GOP primary donnybrook between the establishment right and the antiestablishment right has had a foreshadowing in Polish politics over the past dozen years in the war between Poland's two dominant parties, both conservative. If you want to know what a Trump presidency might be like, ...