Gaslighting Ourselves

After the unfortunate death in the New York subway of mentally ill homeless guy Jordan Neely, I pointed out that much of the stress imposed upon daily life in New York by violent, free-range lunatics like Neely, who had been arrested four times for punching people, wouldn’t be all that hard to ...

Who Needs Facts?

A central conundrum of the 2020s is why respectable opinion has gotten so out of touch with reality on questions touching race, such as crime. Are mainstream pundits lying, intimidated, deluded, hate-filled, or just stupid? It’s an important and difficult question. I ponder this because I’ve ...

Edward Jay Epstein

Epstein’s Epic

Ever since his 1966 book Inquest documented that the Warren Commission’s own staffers believed that their enquiry into who shot JFK had been too rushed to be reliable, Edward Jay Epstein has been that highly useful rarity: a center-right heavyweight investigative journalist. Epstein’s new ...

A Tale of Three Articles

Ever since the transgender school shooter in Nashville, the mainstream media has been on the warpath to impose more point-of-sale gun control...while continuing to encourage Soros-funded prosecutors to weaken the kind of point-of-use gun control that not long ago succeeded in reducing New York City ...

The Death Boom

About thirty years ago I attended a presentation by an executive at a vast snack and beverage company. She announced that her firm’s goal was to have their delicious sugary and salty products within arm’s reach of every American at all times. Maybe they’d never quite fully succeed, but damn ...

Royce Hall, UCLA

Low-Grade Fever

Last week, millions of college acceptances and rejections were sent out to high school seniors. While the 2023 data won’t be available for some time, using 2022 numbers we can now begin to assess the impact of 2020’s dual body blows to higher education: the “racial reckoning” and the ...

Seeds of Discontent

Mass shootings represent masculinity at its most toxic. Hence, we shouldn’t get carried away trying to discern important societal trends in the sample size of a single woman-bites-dog mass shooting in Nashville, in which a troubled young woman shot up her old Christian elementary ...

Stanford University

To Encourage the Others

Tenure—lifetime employment for college professors—is under attack from all sides. The American custom of granting thirtysomething professors the right to a job for life was traditionally said by its defenders to go back to the 1900 dispute between robber baroness Jane Stanford and Edward ...

The Broken Arm of the Law

Occasionally, big media institutions still do valuable reporting. As you’ll recall, the prestige press humiliated themselves back in January when the story first broke about how five black Memphis policemen beat a black motorist to death. The media’s initial response was heavy on explaining ...

A Difference of Degree

Perhaps because this has seemed like the coldest winter I can recall in normally balmy Southern California, I got to wondering: Why do northerners tend to be smarter than southerners? Is it because of the north’s cold winters, as Charles Murray, a son of Iowa, recently suggested on Twitter? To ...