It’s widely assumed today that, due to systemic sexism, women were so culturally oppressed until roughly last week that, of course, there were few famous women writers. In truth, however, women have made up a sizable fraction of professional novelists for centuries. But why then aren’t these ...
The media-declared racial reckoning has elicited from Charles Murray, coauthor of 1994’s epochal The Bell Curve, an important rebuttal: a short, lucid book entitled Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. In January 2020, Murray published a long, scholarly book, Human Diversity: The ...
As I may have mentioned once or twice over the past year, the media-declared “racial reckoning” following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, has been getting a lot of blacks murdered by other blacks. But I am not being ironic in saying that I am now stunned to find out that motor ...
Since the previous century I’ve been articulating in the public arena an array of interconnecting ideas about how the world works. For example, I tend to suspect that racial differences in achievement in 2021 have more to do with nature and nurture, with culture and human biodiversity, than with ...
Gun murders are up 34.4 percent in the 365 days since George Floyd’s death. According to data scraped from Gun Violence Archive, in the Year One B.F. (Before Floyd) from May 25, 2019, to May 24, 2020, there were 13,024 murders committed with a firearm in the U.S. In contrast, in the Year One ...
What matters most: nature or nurture, genes or environment, ancestry or upbringing? The conventional wisdom argues for the malleable latter, even though twin and adoption studies typically find more substantial evidence for nature than for nurture. Yet, I would like to encourage hereditarians to ...
I hadn’t planned to buy the new authorized biography of novelist Philip Roth, author of Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral, because I am at best a lazy admirer of Roth, having read only a handful of books by the indefatigable novelist who died in 2017 at 85. But when I saw it on the ...
Back in May 2013, it dawned on me that, crazy as it sounded in those more innocent times, the Establishment was gearing up to make transgenderism into the next big thing. Lately, my Spidey sense for zeitgeist trends has started tingling again, telling me that my old jokes about how the “equity” ...
During America’s current racial crisis, it’s striking how useless and irrelevant has been the intellectual conventional wisdom, which denies that race even exists. So I’m going to step back from the daily fray this week and sketch out a stylized history of how we came to have two opposing ...
When Joe Biden was 21, liberalism peaked on Nov. 3, 1964, as Lyndon Baines Johnson won over 61 percent of the popular vote and 486 of the 535 electoral votes. On his coattails, Congressional Democrats were carried by LBJ to a 68–32 margin in the Senate and a 295–140 edge in the House. Of the ...
