It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

On this, the second anniversary of the death of George Floyd, the evidence is now overwhelming: American elites have blood on their hands for their hysterical response to a local police blotter incident that has since brought about many thousands of incremental dead bodies on the pavement. The ...

Triggered

Sadly, mass shootings are back in the news with the second Dylann Roof-style white-racist-on-black-innocents mass shooting of the past seven years, this one not in a Charleston church but in a Buffalo supermarket. But despite all the chatter about mass shootings, almost nobody understands the ...

This Sporting Life

Say you have an athletic child in middle school: Specializing in which sport in high school would make it most likely for your son or daughter to earn a college scholarship? The new self-help book from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You ...

Princeton

The Price of Admission

In recent weeks, American college admissions departments sent out to high school student applicants millions of thick envelopes (good news) and thin envelopes (bad news). But finding out what colleges decided in aggregate is becoming increasingly difficult as more universities respond to the ...

Lake Coeur d'Alene

The Spokane Word

What I love about travel (and you probably do too) is how often it confirms stereotypes, even ones I didn’t know but ought to have guessed. In this case, I just got back from the booming Spokane, Washington–Coeur d’Alene, Idaho region, towns I’d never been to before. I’m amused by how ...

The Wealth of Notions

How can we explain the varying wealth of nations? This question has long elicited a wealth of notions. Thus, in my quarter century as a book reviewer, I’ve always been a sucker for taking on ambitious theory-and-history-of-everything books such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, ...

The Last Taboo

Is there a shadowy network of Democrat pedophiles plotting to legalize sex with children? I’ve been hearing that for the past half-dozen years, but to be honest, I don’t see much evidence of any kind of powerful campaign to make child sex abuse the next big thing after gay marriage and ...

Edward O. Wilson’s Inordinate Fondness for Ants

In the 1970s, the Harvard biology department was for life scientists like what Los Alamos in the 1940s had been for physicists: an assemblage of the great names, but with even more clashes of personality and politics. The distinguished science journalist Richard Rhodes, author of the famous 1986 ...

John von Neumann

Math Appeal

The 1940s, when so many new technologies such as atomic weapons and computers were rushed into existence, remains the peak real-life science-fiction decade. So there’s a steady demand from highbrow readers for biographies of the various Manhattan Project superheroes. The latest is The Man ...

The Missing Piece

Dr. Albert Bourla, CEO of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, has published a new memoir entitled Moonshot: Inside Pfizer’s Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible.  While the revolutionary mRNA vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech has not turned out to be as much of a panacea as hoped, for ...