The white/black test-score gap has been in the news since the 1960s, yet much like Mark Twain supposedly said about the weather, despite all the talk, nobody seems able to do much about it. America in the later 21st century will likely be dominated numerically by blacks and Latinos. In 2008, the ...
Many people claim that they pay no attention to race, but then along comes the Jeremy Lin story to prove again that most folks do. Wikipedia, that embodiment of 21st-century attitudes, remains diligent about posting most of its subjects" racial and ethnic background. I enjoy using their ...
Has the gender gap in interracial relationships changed over the decades? As an urbanite in the 1980s and 1990s in LA and Chicago, it was hard not to notice trends among interracial couples. Black/white couples typically featured a black man with a white woman. But among white/East Asian pairs, ...
What has the recent hubbub over “contraception” really been about? On the surface, it’s all maneuvering for the 2012 election, but the passions unleashed, especially on the liberal side, suggest motivations that are more inchoate than tactical. Few topics are more important than the ...
In his new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, master social scientist Charles Murray flavors his portrait of the widening gap between the classes with some human interest by referring to the bottom 30% of American whites as “Fishtown” (after the gritty Philadelphia ...
In her new book The Obamas, Jodi Kantor, a New York Times White House correspondent, recounts that Jacqueline Kennedy once fled the White House without her tomcatting husband for a month’s vacation in Florida, dumping her tiny son on her relatives. During that spell, JFK only bothered to visit ...
What’s the latest from the scientific frontlines in the IQ Wars? As you’ll recall from the press, the Bad Guys are social scientists such as Arthur Jensen, Linda Gottfredson, Charles Murray, and the late Richard Herrnstein. They have all argued that there are differences in average intelligence ...
If the Arab Spring is good for democracy, then it has to be good for diversity, right? We know that democracy and diversity are virtually the same thing: Both words begin with a “d,” end with a “y,” and by definition are good. Who isn’t aware that minority protection (indeed, minority ...
Perhaps the most lauded book of 2011 was Thinking, Fast and Slow by the Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel (or, to be technical, Nobelish) Prize in Economic Sciences. The Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New York Times all anointed it one of the year’s top books. ...
Although future behavioral taboos are notoriously hard to predict, it’s clear that within this decade America will end the use of chimpanzees in entertainment. I’ll go much further out on a limb and also predict that within a generation, and for much the same reasons, we will seriously consider ...
