The Good News and Bad News From the West Coast

The good news is that we actually have flattened the curve. Even in New York City, few hospitals are overwhelmed, and in much of the country, such as California, the situation is better than epidemiologists were predicting only a month ago. For example, in Los Angeles County, home to 10 million ...

Post-Lockdown Hacks

With some good news emerging recently in the battle against the coronavirus, it’s time to think in depth about how to reopen the economy, as the governments of Denmark and Austria, two intelligently run countries that shut down relatively early, are currently planning to do. Obviously, we ...

The USA’s Coronavirus Response: 1941 vs. 1942

The Associated Press reported this week: In the critical month of February, as the virus began taking root in the U.S. population, CDC data shows government labs processed 352 COVID-19 tests—an average of only a dozen per day. At a time in which the failure of the Centers for Disease Control to ...

Reasons for Hope

In the week since my column “Crushing the Coronavirus Curve,” Americans and Britons have rapidly woken up to the pandemic threat and started to take action. One reason awareness grew so rapidly is because of the surge in celebrities testing positive for COVID-19, such as Tom Hanks. Similarly, ...

Crushing the Coronavirus Curve

For weeks, the coronavirus news has been paralyzingly bad, leaving President Trump, the Democratic candidates, and the media with little to offer in the way of pragmatic or inspiring leadership on the issue. But over the past few days, data on new infections in Wuhan, China and in South Korea ...

Secession Studies

Frank H. Buckley’s highbrow yet quick and lively new book American Secession comes with the foreboding subtitle The Looming Threat of a National Breakup, but the conservative George Mason U. law professor and Trump family adviser is sanguine. In Buckley’s view, a Trump reelection combined with ...

Ranking Ruth

I recently unfairly baited the great baseball statistics thinker Bill James into responding at vast length to one of my snarky tweets, which got me thinking about what we could learn from baseball history about how the media often gets The Narrative wrong. The intellectual rigor of baseball ...

Occam’s Butter Knife

In contrast to Angela Saini’s acclaimed but dismal 2019 work of science denialism, Superior: The Return of Race Science, Adam Rutherford’s 2020 book How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality benefits from Rutherford’s lively prose style. The British science writer likes ...

The Anti–Larry David

The energetic media tycoon Ezra Klein has a book out titled Why We’re Polarized. Spoiler alert: One reason is because too many people watch Fox News instead of reading Klein’s properties like Vox. Another cause is because somebody imprudently spilled the beans to “white Christians” that ...

Forming a More Perfect Union

In the middle of August 1982, I was unemployed and looking for a job in New York City. A friend from MBA school called to say he could get me an interview at his Wall Street firm, J.P. Morgan. But Wall Street work was not a gold mine in 1982 because the stock market had been in the doldrums since ...