Last week, I pointed out that the social sciences were suffering from mirror-image problems: the much-publicized Replication Crisis, in which academics announce trivial findings that turn out to be not reproducible, and the less-discussed Repetition Crisis, in which the only explanations for ...
With data becoming ever more abundant, this should be the golden age of the social sciences. And yet they seem to be suffering two mirror-image nervous breakdowns"the Replication Crisis and the Repetition Crisis. Outright made-up-data fraud is hardly unknown in academia, but the double ...
In recent weeks, I kept meaning to write up a stylized history of the evolution of political ideology over recent centuries. But my examples"why Andrew Jackson rather than Alexander Hamilton will get booted off the currency, how Spike Lee learned painfully to start denouncing Hollywood for ...
A simple model that helps make much about the modern world easier to comprehend is that of a high-low tag team against the middle. As part of a time-tested strategy of divide and rule, the rich tend to push for policies and attitudes that increase identity-politics divisiveness"more ...
Back in August in my review of Straight Outta Compton, I predicted that the rap biopic was likely to cause a racial controversy for the Academy Awards because, while the movie wasn"t quite good enough to earn much Oscar love, it was competent enough to trigger feelings of entitlement. As last ...
The upcoming GOP primary donnybrook between the establishment right and the antiestablishment right has had a foreshadowing in Polish politics over the past dozen years in the war between Poland's two dominant parties, both conservative. If you want to know what a Trump presidency might be like, ...
The 20th-century Turkish concept of a "deep state" first spread to other Mediterranean countries such as Italy, and is now slowly being picked up by American pundits. Ex"Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren's 2016 book The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise ...
In the news and opinion business, late December and early January are the dead season as journalists go on vacation, leaving behind their canned top 10 lists for last year and forecasts for the new year. I"m not much of a fan of either, but I do approve of the modest increase in recent years ...
As a Christmas present, I received the book version of The Hard Problem, the latest play by Sir Tom Stoppard. It's the great Tory playwright's first new work for the stage since his Rock "n" Roll in 2006. Granted, it's perfectly reasonable to complain that a playwright who is best enjoyed ...
I average over 400 comments per day over on my iSteve blog on the Unz Review. One advantage of reading all of them is that ideas are dropped in my lap that I wouldn"t hear anywhere else. For example, after the San Bernardino massacre earlier this month, when Americans were beginning to wonder ...
