Can 2018’s tsunami of DNA data on the origins of human biodiversity help explain the puzzle of why Americans tend to equate “diversity” with Africans, especially West Africans? Anthropology has always been assumed to have political implications. For example, in Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire ...

What do the pasts of India and China imply about their futures? 2018’s rapid advances in the race sciences, as exemplified by Harvard geneticist David Reich’s blockbuster book Who We Are and How We Got Here, are reopening old questions such as these. There are few issues more important to ...

Perhaps Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby’s rival for Daisy’s affections, wasn’t totally wrong after all? Countless articles about how unscientifically racist old WASPs were begin by quoting the scene early in The Great Gatsby in which Daisy’s oafish husband, Tom, recommends a book called The Rise ...

“Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys,” blared the headline in Monday’s New York Times, announcing the latest massive study from Stanford economist Raj Chetty. The Times tweeted: Black men raised in the top 1 percent—by millionaires—were as likely to be ...

The most amusing aspect of the impressive, if not particularly comic, new comedy The Death of Stalin is that Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development), who earns most of the film’s laughs as Malenkov, the Soviet dictator’s sad-sack nominal successor, saw his face Photoshopped out of the movie’s ...

Moments after actress Frances McDormand employed her victory speech at the Academy Awards to demand diversity quotas in moviemaking, she was taught a lesson in diversity, good and hard, when her brand-new Oscar was stolen by a black megalomaniac. Terry Bryant, a.k.a. DJ Matari, posted on Facebook ...

What if the world isn’t about to blow up? What if most everything is slowly getting better and better? Would there be nothing to worry about then? The new book by Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, documents, using ...

Stalin famously had a buzzer installed to let his sweating henchmen know when it was finally safe to stop applauding the Great Leader without fear of being sent to the Gulag. In this era when it’s nearly mandatory to greet each new black cultural product as effusively as if it were a cross ...

In our disillusioning modern world, where it’s too easy to look up what life is actually like in the remote real places that used to serve our desire for utopias, Americans now apparently feel the need to believe in CGI movie fictions, such as Wakanda, a technologically advanced isolationist ...

The president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, the colorful Zulu polygamist with, at last count, six wives and 21 children, is in trouble with his ruling African National Congress after having fenced much of the country to the Gupta family. These Indian operators, who moved to South Africa in 1993 to ...