As I may have mentioned now and then, there’s much wrong about the 2020s, but it’s also worth mentioning something right: We’re living in the golden age of airliner safety. The last fatal crash of a commercial flight of an American airline was way back in 2009. (That year could have been ...
The Last Duel, a 2021 film by Sir Ridley Scott with Matt Damon as a mulleted French aristocrat chud battling honorably (if stupidly) a suave Adam Driver in 1386, turned out to be better than expected: not a classic, but quite decent, especially for a director in his mid-80s. (Sir Ridley turns 86 ...
This ought to be a golden age of the social sciences. The immense reduction in the cost of DNA testing is allowing massive assaults on the most venerable conundrums of nature vs. nurture, such as whether the IQ gap between whites and blacks is smaller in more racially admixed African-Americans as ...
I’ve been writing about the perverse side effects of affirmative action for a third of a century, and one of my favorite examples has always been the recurrent attempts to lure more blacks into becoming architects. Having known a lot of architects, I’ve been pointing out that architecture ...
The past month has led to agonizing reappraisals among some mainstream Jewish-American liberals over the traditional Jewish-American shibboleth that diversity must be good for the Jews. Not surprisingly to anybody who has been paying cold-blooded attention to the past half century, the older, ...
“The World Is Becoming More African,” trumpets The New York Times, only eight years after I started warning that the United Nations’ projections for sub-Saharan Africa’s population growth suggest a massive problem by the middle of this century, one that is comparable in scale to climate ...
Canada is currently subjecting itself to a bizarre experiment in extreme population growth due to pedal-to-the-metal legal immigration. Canada’s population rose about 1 percent per year for the first decade and a half of this century. But the Justin Trudeau era began in 2015, and growth was ...
In Michael Lewis’ new biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite, Lewis quotes the accused cryptocurrency embezzler’s rationalist case against Shakespeare: I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare...but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. ...
Walter Isaacson’s biography Elon Musk is as strong as you’d expect from the author of the enormous 2011 bestseller Steve Jobs. The subject of Isaacson’s last book The Code Breaker, Jennifer Doudna, the coinventor of the CRISPR gene-editing method, served as a reasonable representative of how ...
What causes wokeness? Richard Hanania writes in his highly useful new book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, that: Conservatives have blamed wokeness on entities as diverse as capitalists, the education system, recently arrived ...
