The Graduate, the December 1967 box-office smash starring newcomer Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock and Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, is often recounted as a major volley in the history of the Generation Gap. Made on a $3-million budget, it took in over $100 million domestically, which would ...
We live in an era obsessed with gender oppression. For example, Americans were recently alerted that the women of Harvard Business School are deprived of their rightful grade point averages by being asked out so often on expensive dates by well-heeled suitors. Yet this isn"t the first time ...
A striking feature of post-1968 liberalism is its obsession with the problems of people who don"t really have major problems. While activists of the past worried about the fate of coal miners or the unemployed, contemporary activists find more galvanizing the troubles, such as they are, of ...
The estimable Charles Murray has published a new pamphlet, American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History. It builds on the section in his 2012 book Coming Apart explaining what European visitors to the early Republic, from De Tocqueville and Dickens on down, found unique about our country. The ...
Structured around the dismantling of the profitable notion pushed by self-help seers such as Malcolm Gladwell that 10,000 hours of monomaniacal practice is the secret of success, David Epstein’s The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance is one of the best books ...
The hit movie Lee Daniels’ The Butler, staring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey, takes us back to the bad old days when blacks worked in the White House rather than lived there. Strange as it may seem now, in an America where Hispanics and Filipinos fill ever more of America’s servile ...
The new movie Elysium, another science-fiction fable from young Boer refugee Neill Blomkamp about the horrors of mass immigration and nonwhite overpopulation, isn’t terribly amusing to watch. But at the meta level, the career of Blomkamp, whose mother dragged the family off from Johannesburg ...
In the immigration debate, the conventional wisdom is that the solution to millions of "undocumented workers" is for the government to print up documents for them. That always reminds me of a pivotal scene in Evelyn Waugh's prophetic 1932 novel Black Mischief. After observing Haile ...
With Barack Obama solemnly recounting for us last Friday how being black in America has personally burdened him, race is back in the news. Actually, race is always in the news. Still, it’s worth using this particular intersection of inanity"during which the president and the Attorney ...
What can we learn from the media and government frenzy to railroad George Zimmerman, a campaign that continues even after his acquittal, with the Obama Administration now threatening hate-crime charges? First, the KKKrazy Glue that holds together the disparate elements of the Obama Coalition is ...
