President Barack Obama

A Small World

Six years after he was first elected President of the United States, Barack Obama remains something of an enigma to the public he presides over. Ironically, this isn"€™t due to the President being particularly reticent about himself. After all, judging from his two books, the subject Obama finds ...

Oppression Juicing

Liberals such as Barack Obama increasingly rely upon a verbal crutch of asserting that their opponents are on "€œthe wrong side of history."€ This neo-Marxist hand-waving phrase grew from 524 occurrences in news articles in 2006 to 1,800 last year. The "€œwrong side of history"€ claim ...

Rosamund Pike

Gone Girl: The Last Villainess?

The denunciations of the hit mystery movie Gone Girl by feminists for daring to feature (spoiler alert) a scheming villainess rather than a brutish villain exemplifies the growing chasm in outlook between creative artists and the chattering class that assumes they are culturally superior because ...

A New Caste Society

Last week I looked at the multiple ironies of the young Barack Obama's dismissive 1994 review of The Bell Curve. Today, 20 years after the publication of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's magnum opus, let's score the authors"€™ predictions. First, does America in 2014 still look like ...

Obama and The Bell Curve

October 2014 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the most hated book in the history of the social sciences, the 845-page The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein. Back in 1994, innumerable pundits informed ...

The Parthenon

From Taboo to Common Sense

I"€™m sometimes accused of having created a vast secret corpus of sinister ideas that I keep carefully hidden away from the millions of words I"€™ve published. I"€™ve always wondered: When exactly would I have had the time to do this? And do I really seem like the kind of writer who would ...

Fair Play to Scotland?

Thursday's referendum in Scotland on independence from the United Kingdom is difficult for contemporary Americans to understand, since secession has been unthinkable in the United States from the moment Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg fell a few yards short of success. Americans, as ...

More Stinkin”€™ Thinkin”€™ in the NBA

As you"€™ll recall, NBA team owner Donald Sterling was recently purged for being secretly taped objecting to his self-promoting mistress posting pictures online of the black superstars she consorts with in his absence. Sterling vowed to get vengeance by digging up the private remarks of other NBA ...

The Birth of a Nation

Defending Film

This was a bad summer for movies at the American box office, with total gross down 22 percent from last year. Revenue was the lowest since 2006, suggesting that the recent economic crash had artificially pumped up box office in recent years"€”taking in a movie is a relatively cheap night out, so ...

Golfing With the Fishes

Malcolm Gladwell published in The New Yorker a long essay, "€œThe Crooked Ladder: The Gangster's Guide to Upward Mobility,"€ on how black drug dealers today are just like Italian mafiosi, and their descendants would become upper-middle-class professionals too if it weren"€™t for so much law ...