Charlie Sheen

The Republican Drug

With the sports and movie seasons in full swing in October, I"€™m reminded of the many unanswered and often even unasked questions about one of the more pervasive changes of my lifetime: the spread of weight lifting and steroids. Put simply, athletes and actors don"€™t look all that much ...

Gradually and Then Suddenly

Europe's self-inflicted "€œmigrant crisis"€ ought to serve as a warning to Americans citizens that there's no time like the present for planning ahead to stymie similar mass assaults on America's borders. Immigration trickles tend to become floods: "€œHow did you go bankrupt?"€ Bill ...

Occam’s Rubber Room

In the 14th century, the English philosopher William of Ockham introduced what has come to be known as Occam's Razor for its usefulness in slicing through intellectual bloviations: Among competing theories that predict equally well, the simplest should be preferred. About a decade ago, I coined ...

Questions About the Hegira to Germany

The German chancellor is being celebrated for finally redeeming her subjects"€™ innate Nazi bloodguilt by inviting into the European Union huge columns of helpless Syrian refugees. Or at least that's what you are supposed to think, just as you were supposed to assume the innocence of Michael ...

A Tale of Two Suburbs

Two of the better movies of 2015 are weirdly similar musical biopics about bands from Los Angeles"€™ south suburbs. Last June's Love & Mercy profiled Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who came from Hawthorne, Calif., while gangsta rappers N.W.A, who helped spread the South Central L.A. ...

Stumbling Upon a Worthy Cause

This weekend, Donald Trump posted a short position paper on immigration policy that begins with this blast of patriotic common sense: When politicians talk about "€œimmigration reform"€ they mean: amnesty, cheap labor and open borders. The Schumer-Rubio immigration bill was nothing more than ...

Chicago, Illinois

Obama, Trump, and Daffy Duck

Just as Rodney Dangerfield once went to a fight and a hockey game broke out, the Justice Department, George Soros, and the national media encouraged yet another crime spree in poor Ferguson, Mo., over the weekend on the stated assumption that a Michael Brown protest would emerge. Why has the ...

Colin Quinn

True Colin

It's informative to compare two current memoirs focused upon race: the rapturously welcomed Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I reviewed a week ago, and The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America by the veteran Irish-American comic Colin Quinn, last seen ...

The First Rule of White Club

I have found that, in the African-American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth. —Biracial novelist Mat Johnson, Loving Day, 2015 America's foremost public intellectual, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has published a new ...

How to Hire Better Cops

With the Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O"€™Malley being shouted down at a progressive convention for not abasing themselves fully enough to a Black Lives Matter rent-a-mob, it's worth taking a look at what some cities could quite feasibly do to hire better ...