Blade Runner 2049 is a remarkably faithful sequel/tribute to the old noir science-fiction cult film. Although set in Los Angeles’ snowy summer of 2049, thirty years after the first movie’s rainy autumn of 2019, it audaciously replicates most of the crowd-displeasing traits of that famous box ...
Puerto Rico is a test case of whether nationalism is as dispensable as the heightening conventional wisdom assumes. Puerto Rico possesses many of the attributes assumed to represent the utopian post-national future, such as open borders with the United States, diversity, and a lack of national ...
As you may have noticed, football and crime are in the news at the moment. Some National Football League players are supporting Black Lives Matter—the anti-police, pro-rioter, anti-white, pro-Establishment movement—by boycotting the national anthem before games. The president was widely ...
Affirmative action privileges for blacks and (to a lesser extent) Hispanics have been a near-universal feature of college admissions for what is now approaching a half century. What have we learned since the late 1960s? Perhaps the strangest result is that the biggest winners from racial quotas ...
My friend Jerry Pournelle has died at age 84. Jerry was the embodiment of a famous quote by his mentor in the science-fiction business, Robert A. Heinlein: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance ...
This year marks the 20th anniversary of one of the odder best-sellers of the 1990s, polymath Jared Diamond’s ambitiously entitled but rather dry Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Why did a book stuffed with more arcane data about the history of crops and livestock than most ...
Much of the mania of the moment stems from a growing crisis of faith among elites over how much longer they can expect the ideological dogmas under which they have prospered so mightily to withstand the onrushing findings of genetic science. No family illustrates this tension more ironically than ...
Francis Fukuyama hypothesized the ending of history, but he failed to foresee the increasingly popular practice of the mending of history to delegitimize the right of the politically weak to their pride and property. Rewriting the past to help disinherit the powerless by demeaning their ancestors ...
Why the ever-increasing hatred for America’s past? You might think that, on the whole, American history is, relative to world history, fairly impressive and heartening. But it’s precisely American history’s virtues, more than anything else, that enrage so many people these days against the ...
Back in March, I asked in my Taki’s Magazine column “Diversity Versus Debate”: Does the increasing campus hysteria and antirationality portend bad news for Silicon Valley? If students increasingly grow up in a culture in which the person with the most wounded feelings rules, will they be able ...
