Tiger Woods

The Tiger Mother’s Son

A year ago, after a decade of worsening pain from swinging hard since infancy, Tiger Woods, perhaps the highest-paid athlete in history, appeared headed for the same fate as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Prince, and Tom Petty. But this spring Woods is grinding away again on tour, playing surprisingly ...

Rashida Jones

The Affirmative Action Honor System

Although we are constantly told by white intellectuals that race does not exist, the most remarkable aspect of the American system of racial affirmative action is that it works—and surprisingly smoothly—on the honor system. You might assume that if race were an arbitrary social construct, ...

Enumerating Jews

Jonathan Weisman, a mid-level New York Times staffer and author of the short but repetitious new book (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump, is not a particularly acute thinker. But his unoriginality makes his (((Semitism))) a revealing distillation of the conventional wisdom ...

Ghosts of Africa

Can 2018’s tsunami of DNA data on the origins of human biodiversity help explain the puzzle of why Americans tend to equate “diversity” with Africans, especially West Africans? Anthropology has always been assumed to have political implications. For example, in Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire ...

A Pair of Giants

What do the pasts of India and China imply about their futures? 2018’s rapid advances in the race sciences, as exemplified by Harvard geneticist David Reich’s blockbuster book Who We Are and How We Got Here, are reopening old questions such as these. There are few issues more important to ...

Varanasi, India

Reich’s Laboratory

Perhaps Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby’s rival for Daisy’s affections, wasn’t totally wrong after all? Countless articles about how unscientifically racist old WASPs were begin by quoting the scene early in The Great Gatsby in which Daisy’s oafish husband, Tom, recommends a book called The Rise ...

Black-a-Block

“Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys,” blared the headline in Monday’s New York Times, announcing the latest massive study from Stanford economist Raj Chetty. The Times tweeted: Black men raised in the top 1 percent—by millionaires—were as likely to be ...

We Don’t Airbrush, We Photoshop

The most amusing aspect of the impressive, if not particularly comic, new comedy The Death of Stalin is that Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development), who earns most of the film’s laughs as Malenkov, the Soviet dictator’s sad-sack nominal successor, saw his face Photoshopped out of the movie’s ...

Frances McDormand

Trophy Wife

Moments after actress Frances McDormand employed her victory speech at the Academy Awards to demand diversity quotas in moviemaking, she was taught a lesson in diversity, good and hard, when her brand-new Oscar was stolen by a black megalomaniac. Terry Bryant, a.k.a. DJ Matari, posted on Facebook ...

Demolition of Cabrini Green

Are We Doomed?

What if the world isn’t about to blow up? What if most everything is slowly getting better and better? Would there be nothing to worry about then? The new book by Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, documents, using ...