The Fast and the Curious

Merely three years after I revealed here in Taki’s Magazine that both the Ferguson Effect of the mid-2010s and the Floyd Effect of the 2020s had driven up not just homicides but also traffic fatalities, The New York Times has gotten around to noticing that the recent big increase in driving ...

Alger Hiss, 1950

Red Scare

I considered writing about presidential politics, but the way things are going lately, by the time you read this on Wednesday, we may well be on to a whole new storyline I can’t anticipate. So, I’m going to go off topic and reflect on a new paper by two economists about an early example of ...

J.D. Vance

What if I’m Right?: Redux

This week’s dramatic events—Trump surviving being wounded by a would-be assassin quickly followed by his selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate—will focus attention on the newer generation of higher-brow rightist thinkers because it’s now thinkable that Vance, whose first ...

Diversity Up, Fertility Down?

The U.S. total fertility rate briefly exceeded the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman’s lifetime during the Housing Bubble of 2006–2007 but has since dropped steadily, hitting a new record low of 1.62 in 2023. Total births fell 2 percent last year to under 3.6 million, the lowest total ...

New York, September 11

Trust, but Verify

If the mainstream media won’t tell you the truth about the President’s age-driven mental decline until forced to spill the beans by a debate on live TV, can you trust them not to try to mislead you about other things as well? No, of course not. Does that also mean that if they misdirect you ...

Suicide Watch

Something unexpected has been going on with suicide rates over the past half decade. First, though, some background: It is widely assumed by many people who don’t pay close attention to social science statistics that because African-American life is, as we are so often told, unbearably tragic, ...

Caitlin Clark

The Caitlin Conundrum

When thuggishness damaged the appeal of the National Basketball Association around the turn of the century, the executive leadership eventually took successful steps to rein it in. Why haven’t NBA executives intervened in their Women’s NBA vanity project to protect their most valuable asset, ...

Tucker Carlson

Tucker’s Tome

Because I’ve been on the road promoting my anthology Noticing, I decided to review Tucker Carlson’s anthology of his journalism, The Long Slide. Unlike with me, writing an article means that Tucker gets out of his house: I wrote magazine stories for decades, long after I went into television ...

In This House We Believe: The Protestant Roots of Wokeness

In 2017 the pseudonymous blogger Spotted Toad appears to have coined the term “The Great Awokening” to denote the decade of identity politics mania that began about 2013. His joke was of course a pun upon the various Great Awakening religious revivals that periodically swept Protestant America ...

Yale Club, New York

The Grand Tour

Until recently, I would have guessed I’d never get to do an old-fashioned book tour in my lifetime. After all, I didn’t make a single public appearance in more than a decade, from February 2013 until June 2023. I’d occasionally get invited to give speeches, then hear that the hotel had ...