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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 "immigration reform" they mean: amnesty, cheap labor and open borders. The Schumer-Rubio immigration bill was nothing more than ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
