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 ...

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 ...

Institutional momentum continues to build in wealthy parts of the country where blacks were historically least oppressed by slavery and Jim Crow for cashing in white guilt over George Floyd as racial reparations before whites wise up (or cynical Asians and Hispanics take over). For example, posh ...

The fringe theater festival movement is one of the countless liberatory and transgressive developments in the Western arts in the 160 years since the 1863 Salon des Refusés featured French avant-garde painters rejected by the Paris Salon for not subscribing to the stodgy preferences of the ...

I’ve got some good news and some bad news about murder in 2022. The good news: Urban homicides appear to have dropped in 2022 around 5 percent versus 2021. The bad news: That marginal progress only gets us back to the brutal level of 2020, the first year of the ongoing “racial reckoning,” ...

I can vividly recall driving along the coast of Baja California in late 1996 a few days after being diagnosed with cancer, feeling sorry for myself about my impending death. Suddenly, I came around a bend and there was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen: a vast old-fashioned ocean liner with ...

To have been born in the USA in 1946 was to have been dealt aces in the poker game of life. Those born in the first year of the baby boom went through their days finding that there were relatively few older men born during the Depression and The War to hog the leadership roles and an abundance of ...

Tár is a strong art-house drama for older audiences about a #MeToo scandal in the arts that cleverly buys itself the right to be moderately sympathetic toward its ultimately canceled protagonist because writer-director Todd Field has made her not a straight white male but the lesbian conductor of ...

What if I’m right about how the world works? What policies would that imply? My basic insight is that the world actually is pretty much what it looks like, loath as we may be to admit it. When it comes to human behavior, there mostly aren’t systematic differences between what your lying eyes ...

With the World Cup starting this Sunday, I realized that after decades of complaining, I’ve finally made my peace with soccer. Like many Americans, I always felt that the world’s most popular sport was kind of lame. Granted, it was fun to play even if you weren’t any good, and the World ...