What’s the latest from the scientific frontlines in the IQ Wars? As you’ll recall from the press, the Bad Guys are social scientists such as Arthur Jensen, Linda Gottfredson, Charles Murray, and the late Richard Herrnstein. They have all argued that there are differences in average intelligence ...
If the Arab Spring is good for democracy, then it has to be good for diversity, right? We know that democracy and diversity are virtually the same thing: Both words begin with a “d,” end with a “y,” and by definition are good. Who isn’t aware that minority protection (indeed, minority ...
Perhaps the most lauded book of 2011 was Thinking, Fast and Slow by the Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel (or, to be technical, Nobelish) Prize in Economic Sciences. The Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New York Times all anointed it one of the year’s top books. ...
Although future behavioral taboos are notoriously hard to predict, it’s clear that within this decade America will end the use of chimpanzees in entertainment. I’ll go much further out on a limb and also predict that within a generation, and for much the same reasons, we will seriously consider ...
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher won the first of her three terms as Britain’s prime minister. By 2012, however, no American woman has yet reached the presidency. The only woman to make a serious run was considered presidential timber mostly by having been First Lady. Why are women still ...
The more popular it is to worry over some organized threat, the less of a danger it likely is in reality. After all, if some group or institution was truly fearsome, most people would either be terrified into silence or admiration. For example, Dan Brown made a fortune off his The Da Vinci Code ...
There wouldn’t seem to be much left to say about the late Christopher Hitchens after the countless tributes paid by other journalists about the night (or afternoon or morning) they got drunk with Hitch. Still, I want to call admiring attention to his taste in English literature. Unable to ...
One of 2011’s hottest trends is middle-aged pundits announcing that compared to the good old days when they were spry, nothing much is changing anymore. Or at least nothing worth noticing. Economist Tyler Cowen kick-started this fad of bemoaning stasis by publishing one of those newfangled ...
The movie industry’s clean little secret is that it could be even more vastly profitable if only the participants were as mercenary as they enjoy claiming they are in their self-satirizations. Instead, they are so selflessly generous they think it reasonable to hand $170 million to Martin ...
The Descendants, with George Clooney as a Hawaiian land dynasty’s 1/32nd-Polynesian scion, has fans asking where writer-director Alexander Payne has been since 2004’s Sideways, which dispatched Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church on one last trip to the Santa Ynez wine country. (Sideways ...
