Jewish Generosity

As I’ve long pointed out, the most likely fault line where the Democrats’ imposing but fragile Coalition of the Fringes might fracture divides Jews and blacks. Two earlier black moments—the late-’60s Black Power era and the early-’90s Louis Farrakhan fad—both sputtered out when Jews ...

DIE in the Air

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 ...

Joachim Phoenix as Napoleon

Little Boney Goes Hollywood

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 ...

Halting the Pursuit of Knowledge

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 ...

Widener Library, Harvard University

A Barren Field

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 ...

Shifting Support

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, ...

Lagos, Nigeria

Fear of a Black Planet

“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 ...

America, Jr.

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 ...

Don Quixote And Sancho Panza by Louis Aquetin

Mute Inglorious Shakespeares

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. ...

‘Elon Musk’: Purge and Surge

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 ...