For fifteen years, I"ve been writing long analyses of how the data found in Olympic results can help us answer fundamental questions about nature v. nurture, human biodiversity, race, and sex (e.g., 1997, 2000, 2000, 2004, and 2008). This time I"m going to answer random questions about the ...
In this Darwinian age, it has become popular for thinkers to try to dream up the evolutionary mechanisms behind vast, fuzzy phenomena such as art. I don"t have a particularly strong opinion on whether natural selection can account for the arts (other than for the one field I know best, golf ...
Are criminals in real life ever even one-tenth as fascinating as they are in Christopher Nolan movies? Can you think of a real criminal as intriguing as the late Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight or Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb in Inception? Or is "master criminal" just a fantasy where ...
Oliver Stone finally has an entertaining movie"Savages"out in theaters again. It's time to try to do something Stone can"t, which is think dispassionately about conspiracy theories. As Kevin Spacey explained in The Usual Suspects, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was ...
With Silicon Valley back on top of the world, it's time to point out a bit of unwelcome history. There are two competing narratives about the technology hub's origins: "¢ The famous tale of how William Shockley's obnoxious management style led to start-up silicon chipmakers such as ...
Every Fourth of July, a heretical question nags: Would it have been so bad if America hadn"t won its independence from Britain? This is not a popular topic among Americans, who invest everything about independence with transcendent import. We"re not happy merely saying that the Revolution ...
One of the biggest changes of my lifetime has been the decline in the speed of social change. Today it's easy to agree with Ecclesiastes that "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Yet that was once heresy. In high school, ...
The struggles of even the best-connected California celebrities to nail down every last one of the permits they need to build on their own property helps demonstrate why differences in topography drive Californians toward voting for environmentalist Democrats and Texans toward pro-business ...
You probably haven"t heard of Get the Gringo, a recent Lethal Weapon-like action movie starring Mel Gibson and directed by his right-hand man Adrian Grunberg. Mad Mel plays Driver, an American criminal who makes a run for the border, only to wind up in one of those Beyond Thunderdome-like ...
To anybody who saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as a child, Pythagoras's 2,500-year-old intuition that astronomy and music must be intertwined seems self-evident. The opening minute of 2001 is set to the thunderous "Sunrise" sequence of Also sprach Zarathustra, Richard ...
