The term “Gell-Mann Amnesia effect” was coined by the late novelist Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) in honor of the famous physicist who died last month. Murray Gell-Mann had pointed out to Crichton that he had noticed that journalists aren’t very accurate at writing about his own specialty, ...

The RMS Titanic was notoriously marketed as “unsinkable” because it featured sixteen internal watertight compartments. If its hull sprang a leak at any one spot, doors would automatically shut and contain the water. If no more than two, or in some cases four, compartments flooded, the Titanic ...

Jared Diamond, who became a famous public intellectual when his 1997 best-seller Guns, Germs, and Steel was widely proclaimed to have refuted The Bell Curve by arguing that the variation in achievement among races today is a cultural side effect of ancient differences in agricultural potential ...

James Holzhauer has won 22 straight games on Jeopardy! Meanwhile, baseball slugger Christian Yelich is leading the National League with 16 homers. What do they have in common besides being young men enjoying vintage 2019s? For one thing, Holzhauer, a professional sports gambler in Las Vegas, has ...

The good old days of blogging when just about any blogger could, at least until he ran out of ideas, be somebody has come and gone. So the few new bloggers who have made an impact in recent years have had to be awfully smart. Ranking up near Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex among the top new ...

One of the most fashionable manifestations of Trump derangement syndrome—the assumption that Walls Never Work—is crushingly debunked in historian David Frye’s eye-opening history of 4,000 years of barrier-building, from the Fertile Crescent to the Malibu Colony, Walls: A History of ...

Last week’s fire in the world’s most famous Gothic cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris, reminds us of the increasingly awkward political issue posed by the immense achievements of the European past. In the current year, liberal individualism is falling out of fashion. As our culture becomes more ...

Why is discrimination against the short considered not only tolerable, but also amusing? In an era constantly on the lookout for prejudices to denounce, this obvious one gets a pass. The main reason our culture doesn’t denounce short-shaming is highly revealing about the essential nature of ...

The recent upsurge among white liberals of their quasi-religious belief that racial differences in average behavior can’t possibly be real—“the Great Awokening”—is on a collision course with the routine workings of the criminal justice system, which finds that, say, blacks are several ...

It was a bad week for polite society’s most respectable conspiracy theories, with the debunking of the Trump-Putin collusion allegation and more implosions among the conspiracy-theory-mongers at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Shortly after suddenly firing Morris Dees, the SPLC’s ...