Like many nerdy white guys of my generation, I"ve found the life story of Bill James inspiring ever since I began reading his Baseball Abstracts thirty years ago this month. A night watchman at a pork and beans cannery, James began writing up statistical analyses of baseball questions (for ...
The governments of Europe are confronting an epochal choice in the Mediterranean. Do they allow Europe to remain on course toward inundation by the African population explosion, inevitably turning Florence into Ferguson and Barcelona into Baltimore? The conventional wisdom is that it's unthinkable ...
In his New York Times column "Checking Charlie Hebdo's Privilege," Ross Douthat took on the reigning orthodoxy about how we should only "punch up" at the more "privileged." Ross rolled his eyes at liberal cartoonist Garry Trudeau for arguing that the poor Parisian ...
Is Barack Obama keeping a little list of ongoing litigation against the federal government that he intends to take a dive on during the interregnum after the 2016 election? I would hardly be surprised. It's an old Democratic tradition. One of the more evil things an outgoing administration can do ...
Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard political scientist most famous for his 1995 article "Bowling Alone" about the decline of social capital, is the liberal Charles Murray. Putnam has long benefited from being the slightly dull but ideologically respectable alternative to Murray. It helped ...
The hubbub over last week's election in Israel is another reminder of why the Democrats have pinned all their 2016 hopes on Hillary Clinton. The Democrats are planning a coronation rather than a competitive donnybrook (like the one the Republicans seem to be ginning up) because a genuine battle in ...
With Tuesday's election, Israel is back in the news. I"m writing this Monday night, so I don"t know who has won. And you may not know either because Israeli politics are so carefully calibrated that governments often aren"t formed until after several days of post-election ...
I never paid much attention to the growing BDS movement because I"m not into bondage, domination, and submission. But it turns out that BDS is actually a decade-old Palestinian rights movement that targets Israel for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. These are the same tools that student ...
It has become a press custom to ask Republican presidential hopefuls, such as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, whether they believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The intention is to trap the politicians between their Biblical literalist supporters and the prestige of Science with a ...
Next Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of American movies as the premier pop cultural force on the planet. On March 3, 1915, director D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, an unprecedented epic about the Civil War and Reconstruction that commemorated the 50th anniversary of Appomattox and ...
