Seeds of Discontent

Mass shootings represent masculinity at its most toxic. Hence, we shouldn’t get carried away trying to discern important societal trends in the sample size of a single woman-bites-dog mass shooting in Nashville, in which a troubled young woman shot up her old Christian elementary ...

Stanford University

To Encourage the Others

Tenure—lifetime employment for college professors—is under attack from all sides. The American custom of granting thirtysomething professors the right to a job for life was traditionally said by its defenders to go back to the 1900 dispute between robber baroness Jane Stanford and Edward ...

The Broken Arm of the Law

Occasionally, big media institutions still do valuable reporting. As you’ll recall, the prestige press humiliated themselves back in January when the story first broke about how five black Memphis policemen beat a black motorist to death. The media’s initial response was heavy on explaining ...

A Difference of Degree

Perhaps because this has seemed like the coldest winter I can recall in normally balmy Southern California, I got to wondering: Why do northerners tend to be smarter than southerners? Is it because of the north’s cold winters, as Charles Murray, a son of Iowa, recently suggested on Twitter? To ...

Great Shakes

I was going to write another heavy duty current events data analysis column, but then I got distracted and/or lazy, so this essay is going to wander off to a more fun topic. When I saw the headline that senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) had finally announced she would retire in 2025 at age 91, I got ...

Eddie Murphy, Coming to America

The Chetty Charts

Last week I answered the common question of whether the higher black male crime rate is due to poverty when growing up by diving into Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s immense database: No, it turns out, black men are about four times more likely than white men whose parents had the exact same ...

America’s Black Male Problem

Since May 25, 2020, America has crucified itself over a single statistic: Blacks are two to three times more likely to die at the hands of the police than are whites, making up 25 to 35 percent of police killings. In contrast, other data points that could add nuance to the conversation are ...

Generational Gobbledygook: Astrology for MBAs

As we are constantly lectured, race does not exist. Yet, almost nobody points out that the conventional wisdom that races are wholly arbitrary social constructs is actually far truer for the popular concept of “generations,” such as baby boomers, millennials, and Alphas. For instance, it’s ...

Memphis, Tennessee

Blacks Behaving Badly in Memphis

One downside of reading me is that tomorrow’s headlines aren’t as full of surprises. For example, while much of the media world is currently stunned that the five Memphis cops who beat a black motorist to death are black, my regular readers aren’t. I start with empirical observations and ...

The 2020s: The Car Crash Decade

Traffic fatalities, like murders, should be in steady decline due to improving technology and big data analyses of danger spots leading to better policing and infrastructure. That’s happening in much of the world, but not in the U.S. in this decade. For example, in a serious country, Japan, in ...