August has been turning into Black Movie Month. This year, Tate Taylor, the white guy from Mississippi who directed August 2011's The Help, is back with a stylized James Brown musical biopic, Get On Up, that's less reverential and more fun than expected. In an era that treasures all evidence of ...
We live in a century of nonstop adulation over how statistical analysis of big data is changing the world. Brad Pitt, for instance, starred in a successful Hollywood movie, Moneyball, about the fast-changing realm of baseball statistics. Last week, however, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics ...
Whenever the Democrats whip up a feminist frenzy to win elections, as in 1992 and 2012, I"m reminded of a deflationary joke I"ve always seen attributed to a 1970s secretary of state. For example, premier gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote in 1988: ""Nobody will ever win the battle of ...
The usual complaint of critics about sequels is that they are intellectually unchallenging. Yet sequels have become more cognitively demanding as screenwriters have come to assume that moviegoers will first brush up on the finer points of the prior movie using Wikipedia. Moreover, the people who ...
The current surge of Central American children and mothers across the border has made a travesty of the schmaltzy arguments long employed to rationalize the government's winking at illegal immigration. George W. Bush famously assured us that we shouldn"t worry about illegal aliens because ...
Soccer, while traditionally lacking in highbrow accoutrements like sophisticated statistics (although those are improving) or literature (the most memorable English-language book on the game is American writer Bill Buford's memoir of English soccer hooliganism, Among the Thugs), is a wonderful ...
If you"d asked me at the peak of public cynicism about giant oil companies"say, 1975"if within a quarter of a century a Democratic administration would allow Exxon and Mobil to merge into ExxonMobil, I"d have assumed you were nuts. After all, Exxon (formerly the Standard Oil ...
One of the surprises in Thomas Piketty's best seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century is how grating the Frenchman's prose style turns out to be. Granted, Piketty has valid reasons for being perpetually outraged at his fellow economists" ignorance and cupidity. In this post-1968 era in ...
As the professional golf season crests this week at the U.S. Open, it's worth noting that the game, while still growing in popularity among the robber barons of ex-communist countries like China and Russia, has been in long-term decline in the United States since the 2001 recession. Although ...
The conventional wisdom about how race is just a social construct is back in the news with the endless excoriations of Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. Sadly, the term "social construct" is usually used as an excuse to stop thinking: just announce ...
