For most of history, being a hereditary aristocrat was a good job. The only catch was the old concept of noblesse oblige, which suggested that people of wealth, power, and influence were honor bound to defend the general public. Today, however, it's more prestigious to be a victim of the majority. ...
With the exception of the teeming masses of Philip K. Dick adaptations, science fiction movies (such as the new Interstellar) tend to be based on original screenplays rather than the genre's classic novels. One reason has been budgetary: mainstream novels, such as Gone Girl, consist mostly of ...
I"m writing this a day before the midterm elections and you"re reading it at least a day after, so I"ll focus upon a continuing feature of the political landscape: Barack Obama. No doubt the results of the midterm election are being interpreted as a referendum on Obama. But who ...
Six years after he was first elected President of the United States, Barack Obama remains something of an enigma to the public he presides over. Ironically, this isn"t due to the President being particularly reticent about himself. After all, judging from his two books, the subject Obama finds ...
Liberals such as Barack Obama increasingly rely upon a verbal crutch of asserting that their opponents are on "the wrong side of history." This neo-Marxist hand-waving phrase grew from 524 occurrences in news articles in 2006 to 1,800 last year. The "wrong side of history" claim ...
The denunciations of the hit mystery movie Gone Girl by feminists for daring to feature (spoiler alert) a scheming villainess rather than a brutish villain exemplifies the growing chasm in outlook between creative artists and the chattering class that assumes they are culturally superior because ...
Last week I looked at the multiple ironies of the young Barack Obama's dismissive 1994 review of The Bell Curve. Today, 20 years after the publication of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's magnum opus, let's score the authors" predictions. First, does America in 2014 still look like ...
October 2014 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the most hated book in the history of the social sciences, the 845-page The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein. Back in 1994, innumerable pundits informed ...
I"m sometimes accused of having created a vast secret corpus of sinister ideas that I keep carefully hidden away from the millions of words I"ve published. I"ve always wondered: When exactly would I have had the time to do this? And do I really seem like the kind of writer who would ...
Thursday's referendum in Scotland on independence from the United Kingdom is difficult for contemporary Americans to understand, since secession has been unthinkable in the United States from the moment Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg fell a few yards short of success. Americans, as ...
