Reconstructing Race

Denunciatory reviews of Nicholas Wade's book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History have typically fallen into two general categories: "€¢ Well, nobody believes that race has no biological reality and is just a social construct, so the first half of the book, while accurate, ...

The Strange Evolution of Eugenics

Predictably, responses to veteran New York Times genetics reporter Nicholas Wade's new book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History are already starting to break down along ethnic lines. For example, the quite intelligent and extremely hostile anthropologist Jonathan Marks, who ...

Blenheim Palace

Curse You, Supply and Demand!

Like many pundits opining upon French economist Thomas Piketty's new book about how the rich always get richer and something has to be done about it, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, I haven"€™t actually read it. But that's not my fault: I blame capitalism! The capitalist system didn"€™t ...

The Liberal Creationists

As the topic of race continues to pop up in the news now and then, what with the Los Angeles Clippers imbroglio and whatnot, it's worth reconsidering the conventional wisdom on the subject, which has congealed into: "€œRace does not biologically exist because, uh ... Science!"€ Nicholas Wade, ...

Borat aka Sacha Baron Cohen

Mythos and Blood

As the years roll on through the Obama Era and the evidence accumulates that the failure of blacks to catch up has less and less to do with white racism, the American media has become increasingly obsessed with pounding the drums over the sins of white people's forefathers in the ever more ...

Winston Churchill

Give it up, Psmithe

Economic historian Gregory Clark, a Glaswegian now at UC Davis, has been extending a main channel of British science into the 21st Century. His new book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility is another milestone in the revitalization of the human sciences after their ...

But Is It Good for the Gays?

Young Jewish Man: "€œIs there a proper blessing for the Czar?"€ Rabbi: "€œA blessing for the Czar? Of course! May God bless and keep the Czar… far away from us!"€ Fiddler on the Roof As Enoch Powell noted, "€œThe supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable ...

Half a Loaf

William Goldman's fantasy tale The Princess Bride made famous the saying “never get involved in a land war in Asia” (it was purportedly advice General Douglas MacArthur gave to President John F. Kennedy regarding Vietnam). But historically the costs of a land war in Europe have been ...

Dmitro Yarosh

Waving the False Flag

With murky foreign affairs much in the news, it’s worth trying to figure out how to think about the notion of “false flag” operations"€”would, say, a counterterrorism agency stage an act of terrorism to make its political enemies look bad or perhaps just to drum up support for ...

One if by Land, Two if by Sea

While American geopolitical thought tends to divide the world up morally into the Democratic (whoever is on our side) and the Evil (vice-versa), Russians tend to strategize geographically in terms of Land (Mother Russia) v. Sea (those deplorable Atlanticists). This dichotomy leads to endless ...