12 Years a Slave"a biopic about Solomon Northup, a black fiddler in New York who somehow wound up a slave in Louisiana from 1841 until the law rescued him in 1853"is the nearly universally acclaimed frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar. Yet it’s built upon a fourth-rate screenplay ...
If a runaway trolley were about to smash into a bus containing 100 trapped members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra, would you push a wholly innocent man named Chip Ellsworth III onto the tracks to stop the accident? What if the bus held 100 members of the New York Philharmonic and the guilt-free ...
There was a fair amount of national media excitement this weekend over the news that Darrell Wallace, Jr. had won a NASCAR race. As a Southern Californian, my attention span for auto racing has shrunk to the four seconds it takes a top fuel dragster at the Pomona Winternationals to roar 1,000 ...
Is Texas about the best fate that a heavily Hispanicized America can hope for? In a future United States that won’t be able to generate all that much per-capita wealth, is Texas‘s system of cheap labor, cheap land, cheap taxes, and cheap government the only plausible future for the ...
Continuing its blanket coverage of the problems of people who don’t really have problems, The New York Times turns from the plight of female Harvard Business School students to the tribulation of female Yale physics majors. In “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?,” ...
The Graduate, the December 1967 box-office smash starring newcomer Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock and Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, is often recounted as a major volley in the history of the Generation Gap. Made on a $3-million budget, it took in over $100 million domestically, which would ...
We live in an era obsessed with gender oppression. For example, Americans were recently alerted that the women of Harvard Business School are deprived of their rightful grade point averages by being asked out so often on expensive dates by well-heeled suitors. Yet this isn"t the first time ...
A striking feature of post-1968 liberalism is its obsession with the problems of people who don"t really have major problems. While activists of the past worried about the fate of coal miners or the unemployed, contemporary activists find more galvanizing the troubles, such as they are, of ...
The estimable Charles Murray has published a new pamphlet, American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History. It builds on the section in his 2012 book Coming Apart explaining what European visitors to the early Republic, from De Tocqueville and Dickens on down, found unique about our country. The ...
Structured around the dismantling of the profitable notion pushed by self-help seers such as Malcolm Gladwell that 10,000 hours of monomaniacal practice is the secret of success, David Epstein’s The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance is one of the best books ...
