With an election coming up, various well-known Democrats haven’t been able to keep themselves from arguing with me on Twitter about crime statistics, which tends to be an imprudent idea. For example, David Simon, creator of the famous TV show about black crime in Baltimore, The Wire, has been ...
Ali G: [Explaining his business idea] What is the most popular thing in the world? Donald Trump: [Ponders the question, then decisively finds the right answer] Music. G: [After a long pause] No. Trump: [Bored] Tell me. G: Ice cream! Trump: Okay... Because music may well be the most popular thing in ...
The so-far triumphant transgender movement is a political coalition that includes two polar opposite sets of allies who are so radically different in their thought styles that they can’t even begin to understand each other: naive nice moms and smart but not-at-all nice nerdy ex-men. The ...
The rise and fall of fame—or at least of the number of times books mention the name of an artist or other historical figure—can be conveniently graphed using Google’s free Ngram Viewer. Google has digitized the contents of 129 million books. Ngram lets you look up how relatively frequently a ...
At least since the 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, social scientists have been publishing rankings of countries by average cognitive test scores and pointing out how closely these figures correlate with gross domestic product per capita. The mere existence ...
In today’s political struggles, all sides are increasingly convinced that the other guys are conspiring to employ devious, insidious, all-conquering social media schemes to brainwash the world into obeying their nefarious wishes. For instance, on Sunday The New York Times ran a lengthy article ...
The success of Ukraine’s surprise northeastern offensive suggests a fundamental problem for the invaders: When it comes to seizing and holding land in Ukraine, the average Russian soldier’s heart just isn’t in it. But why should it be? After all, unlike Patrick Swayze’s guerrilla in Red ...
Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, didn’t have running water last week. Fortunately, water pressure has now been restored, but the unhappy residents are still being instructed to boil their tap water. The Washington Post explains that the reason 82.5 percent black Jackson can’t keep its ...
During the dog days of August, there was a brief flurry of partisan excitement when Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert denounced the White House’s student loan giveaway as, “Joe Biden is robbing hardworking Americans to pay for Karen’s daughter’s degree in lesbian dance theory.” In ...
Everybody has an opinion on matters of crime and race, but not that many people are familiar with the facts. So I’m going to devote this column to furnishing basic data about the best documented and most important crime, homicide. The single most important fact about crime in the United States ...
