Armand Hammer

The Bolshevik Billionaire

Works of art looted by the Nazis remain a subject of much fascination in the 21st century. This year's movie Woman in Gold with Helen Mirren as a Los Angeles woman battling in court to get back her aunt's Gustav Klimt painting did well at the box office. Last year's George Clooney-directed ...

The Density Divide

The concept of America being divided into sprawling red Republican regions and dense blue Democrat districts first became a cliché In November"€“December 2000. Over the past decade and a half I"€™ve probably thought as much about the underlying reasons as anybody, and in this column I"€™d ...

The Coulter Effect

Immigration, with its bumptious reality of comically mercenary fraud covered up by pious cant, provides Ann Coulter with the best topic of her career in ¡Adios, America! The quantity of humbug emitted about the sacredness of immigration has reached laughable levels since Mexican monopolist Carlos ...

Leonardo Dicaprio

The British Invasion

Are American actors in decline due to the rise of better-trained British leading men, as an Atlantic article by Terrence Rafferty contends? Sure, the younger Brits are more skilled actors on average, but when wasn’t this true? Cary Grant, for example, was the greatest romantic-comedy leading ...

The Flight From White

As you may have noticed, the more denunciations we hear of Cisgender Straight White Male Privilege, the more the evidence mounts that, all else being equal, the rewards in 2015 tend to lie on the other side. If you want to know which side is more powerful at present, just observe who is wielding ...

Brian Wilson

Life of Brian

Love & Mercy is a superb new biopic about head Beach Boy Brian Wilson's creative summit in 1966, the year of the groundbreaking Pet Sounds album (featuring the sublime "€œWouldn"€™t It Be Nice"€ and "€œGod Only Knows"€) and follow-up "€œGood Vibrations"€ mega-single, the ...

Ten Thousand Haven Monahans

"€œThe philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."€ "€“ Karl Marx The latest liberal hoax exposed is a happy face mirror image of the U. of Virginia rape fraud: a massively publicized paper in Science, the most prominent American ...

San Francisco Bay

Liberalism Is Expensive, Conservatism Is Cheap

Here's another set of polarities to accompany previous concepts such as Fringe versus Core and High/Low versus Middle that are useful in grasping why some things in modern America are automatically assumed to be liberal and others conservative. This is a reductionist, one-dimensional perspective ...

Charlize Theron in Fury Road

Fury Road at the Box Office

The four Mad Max movies are nominally post-apocalyptic, although their explanations for the end of civilization keeps mutating as the budgets expand, from the decline of morality in 1979's Mad Max to the energy crisis in 1981's Road Warrior to nuclear Armageddon in 1985's Beyond Thunderdome to all ...

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

Moneyball for Real Estate

Where's the best place to move for your children's sake? For several years now, a Harvard Big Data project has been crunching confidential IRS numbers to discover the enduring secrets of why some parts of the country nurture more prosperous young people than other places. Is it public ...