Modern school shootings are an exceptionally abhorrent phenomenon that we got along just fine without for the first couple of centuries of U.S. history. So, it’s wholly reasonable to want them gone. It’s not like America was suffering from any lack of the beneficial side effects of school ...

On this, the second anniversary of the death of George Floyd, the evidence is now overwhelming: American elites have blood on their hands for their hysterical response to a local police blotter incident that has since brought about many thousands of incremental dead bodies on the pavement. The ...

Sadly, mass shootings are back in the news with the second Dylann Roof-style white-racist-on-black-innocents mass shooting of the past seven years, this one not in a Charleston church but in a Buffalo supermarket. But despite all the chatter about mass shootings, almost nobody understands the ...

Say you have an athletic child in middle school: Specializing in which sport in high school would make it most likely for your son or daughter to earn a college scholarship? The new self-help book from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You ...

In recent weeks, American college admissions departments sent out to high school student applicants millions of thick envelopes (good news) and thin envelopes (bad news). But finding out what colleges decided in aggregate is becoming increasingly difficult as more universities respond to the ...

What I love about travel (and you probably do too) is how often it confirms stereotypes, even ones I didn’t know but ought to have guessed. In this case, I just got back from the booming Spokane, Washington–Coeur d’Alene, Idaho region, towns I’d never been to before. I’m amused by how ...

How can we explain the varying wealth of nations? This question has long elicited a wealth of notions. Thus, in my quarter century as a book reviewer, I’ve always been a sucker for taking on ambitious theory-and-history-of-everything books such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, ...

Is there a shadowy network of Democrat pedophiles plotting to legalize sex with children? I’ve been hearing that for the past half-dozen years, but to be honest, I don’t see much evidence of any kind of powerful campaign to make child sex abuse the next big thing after gay marriage and ...

In the 1970s, the Harvard biology department was for life scientists like what Los Alamos in the 1940s had been for physicists: an assemblage of the great names, but with even more clashes of personality and politics. The distinguished science journalist Richard Rhodes, author of the famous 1986 ...

The 1940s, when so many new technologies such as atomic weapons and computers were rushed into existence, remains the peak real-life science-fiction decade. So there’s a steady demand from highbrow readers for biographies of the various Manhattan Project superheroes. The latest is The Man ...