A new contender in the war of books over the implications of the onrushing discoveries in genetics is the exhaustive 656-page She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer, winner of the 2016 Stephen Jay Gould Prize. Zimmer, who is more or less ...
The deaths this month of literary giants Tom Wolfe, age 88, and Philip Roth, 85, illuminated a little-noticed divide in American life. The two writers were fairly comparable combinations of talent, energy, ambition, and personality, so it’s instructive to see how their reputations ...
A year ago, after a decade of worsening pain from swinging hard since infancy, Tiger Woods, perhaps the highest-paid athlete in history, appeared headed for the same fate as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Prince, and Tom Petty. But this spring Woods is grinding away again on tour, playing surprisingly ...
Although we are constantly told by white intellectuals that race does not exist, the most remarkable aspect of the American system of racial affirmative action is that it works—and surprisingly smoothly—on the honor system. You might assume that if race were an arbitrary social construct, ...
Jonathan Weisman, a mid-level New York Times staffer and author of the short but repetitious new book (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump, is not a particularly acute thinker. But his unoriginality makes his (((Semitism))) a revealing distillation of the conventional wisdom ...
Can 2018’s tsunami of DNA data on the origins of human biodiversity help explain the puzzle of why Americans tend to equate “diversity” with Africans, especially West Africans? Anthropology has always been assumed to have political implications. For example, in Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire ...
What do the pasts of India and China imply about their futures? 2018’s rapid advances in the race sciences, as exemplified by Harvard geneticist David Reich’s blockbuster book Who We Are and How We Got Here, are reopening old questions such as these. There are few issues more important to ...
Perhaps Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby’s rival for Daisy’s affections, wasn’t totally wrong after all? Countless articles about how unscientifically racist old WASPs were begin by quoting the scene early in The Great Gatsby in which Daisy’s oafish husband, Tom, recommends a book called The Rise ...
“Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys,” blared the headline in Monday’s New York Times, announcing the latest massive study from Stanford economist Raj Chetty. The Times tweeted: Black men raised in the top 1 percent—by millionaires—were as likely to be ...
The most amusing aspect of the impressive, if not particularly comic, new comedy The Death of Stalin is that Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development), who earns most of the film’s laughs as Malenkov, the Soviet dictator’s sad-sack nominal successor, saw his face Photoshopped out of the movie’s ...
