October 2014 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the most hated book in the history of the social sciences, the 845-page The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein. Back in 1994, innumerable pundits informed ...
I"m sometimes accused of having created a vast secret corpus of sinister ideas that I keep carefully hidden away from the millions of words I"ve published. I"ve always wondered: When exactly would I have had the time to do this? And do I really seem like the kind of writer who would ...
Thursday's referendum in Scotland on independence from the United Kingdom is difficult for contemporary Americans to understand, since secession has been unthinkable in the United States from the moment Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg fell a few yards short of success. Americans, as ...
As you"ll recall, NBA team owner Donald Sterling was recently purged for being secretly taped objecting to his self-promoting mistress posting pictures online of the black superstars she consorts with in his absence. Sterling vowed to get vengeance by digging up the private remarks of other NBA ...
This was a bad summer for movies at the American box office, with total gross down 22 percent from last year. Revenue was the lowest since 2006, suggesting that the recent economic crash had artificially pumped up box office in recent years"taking in a movie is a relatively cheap night out, so ...
Malcolm Gladwell published in The New Yorker a long essay, "The Crooked Ladder: The Gangster's Guide to Upward Mobility," on how black drug dealers today are just like Italian mafiosi, and their descendants would become upper-middle-class professionals too if it weren"t for so much law ...
August has been turning into Black Movie Month. This year, Tate Taylor, the white guy from Mississippi who directed August 2011's The Help, is back with a stylized James Brown musical biopic, Get On Up, that's less reverential and more fun than expected. In an era that treasures all evidence of ...
We live in a century of nonstop adulation over how statistical analysis of big data is changing the world. Brad Pitt, for instance, starred in a successful Hollywood movie, Moneyball, about the fast-changing realm of baseball statistics. Last week, however, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics ...
Whenever the Democrats whip up a feminist frenzy to win elections, as in 1992 and 2012, I"m reminded of a deflationary joke I"ve always seen attributed to a 1970s secretary of state. For example, premier gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote in 1988: ""Nobody will ever win the battle of ...
The usual complaint of critics about sequels is that they are intellectually unchallenging. Yet sequels have become more cognitively demanding as screenwriters have come to assume that moviegoers will first brush up on the finer points of the prior movie using Wikipedia. Moreover, the people who ...
