The important new book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, by Los Angeles Times homicide reporter Jill Leovy, is the hybrid of a true crime tale about the struggle of white LAPD detective John Skaggs to find the killer of the son of a black LAPD detective and a taboo-breaking ...
The real estate market is back in the news, although, not surprisingly, it's now the mirror image of last decade's excesses. Ten years ago the prices of exurban tract homes in the sand states of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida reached absurd heights, but everybody figured that these hot ...
With identity politics and their accompanying political correctness in the news (as usual), it's worth considering how similar human urges play out in the world of sports. If Congressional politics is notoriously show biz for the ugly, then identity politics is athletics for the ...
It's widely assumed, both by liberals and conservatives, that the fields of arts and entertainment innately induce egalitarian political leanings. Much of the prestige of the left, in fact, derives from the notion that it's only natural for creative people to favor equality above all ...
Clint Eastwood's Iraq war drama, American Sniper, reminds me that the central frustration of being a film critic is that there isn"t much opportunity to be a tastemaker, because it's pretty obvious to most everybody whether a film works or not. If you have to explain why a movie works, then it ...
Last week's Paris massacres of cartoonists and Jews might suggest to a dispassionate observer that endless mass immigration to France from the continent of Africa isn"t working out as well as expected, and thus it's time to cut back. After all, when you find yourself in a hole, the first ...
Over the last half-century, enormous efforts have been expended by individuals to get their groups, such as blacks, women, Jews, homosexuals, and Hispanics, certified as authentic victims of society. Just since 2013, the "transgendered" have achieved cultural validation as designated ...
Has the cult of Alan Turing finally jumped the shark with the well-made but tepid movie The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the British mathematician and computer science pioneer who died of cyanide poisoning in 1954? Over the decades, Turing has become ever more of a folk hero ...
The Progressive crack-up of late 2014 began in early November: the voters rejected the Democrats" "Coalition of the Fringes" campaign themes of Ferguson, feminism, and foreigners. It worsened with the shameful Michael Brown riots and the ludicrous fraternity gang rape libel, which has ...
Last week, in the wake of the grand jury's decision in Ferguson and the ensuing night of undocumented shoppers, I was planning to write the definitive essay on why the engineers of conventional wisdom"the holders of the Megaphone"always seem to get their big stories so ludicrously ...
