Dear Quilletters,

This week we’re pleased to bring you some unique pieces on fascinating topics. Along with law professor Doriane Coleman, 18-time Grand Slam winner Martina Navratilova offers us a critique of the International Olympic Committee's new rules for female competition in elite sport.

Psychiatrist Sally Satel laments the political indoctrination creeping into the medical profession. And psychologist and education expert, Russell T. Warne, provides a data rich argument for why "equity" initiatives in education are likely to hurt vulnerable children the most.

We also have a special treat for Beatles fans. Christopher Snowden reviews the new Peter Jackson documentary Get Back, which gives a remarkable look inside the band's final days.

I am also thrilled to introduce Scott Newman, our new Associate Editor at Quillette. A graduate of Princeton University, he wrote for us this week on the inefficacy of a Kantian approach to domestic policy issues in the US. His first book, The Night Before the Morning After recently won four first-place Firebird Book Awards. We're very lucky to have Scott, and we look forward to working with him in the months to come.

And for our Jewish readers celebrating the holiday, Happy Channukah!

—Claire

Education and the Professions

The Push for Equity in Education Hurts Vulnerable Children the Most

America has always had an uneasy relationship with brilliance. Cultural tropes, like the mad scientist or the nerdy computer whiz, show both a respect for high accomplishment and an anxiety about how smart people fit into society. This cultural uneasiness is most apparent in the educational realm. S…

QuilletteRussell T. Warne

What is Happening to My Profession?

Twenty-one years ago, I wrote a book called PC, M.D. How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine. One chapter explored “multicultural counseling,” a form of therapy that encouraged white clinicians to ask themselves, “what responsibility do you hold for the racist oppressive and discriminating…

QuilletteSally Satel

Art and Culture

Peter Jackson’s ‘Get Back’—A Review

Somewhere, I have a copy of the Beatles’ final film, Let It Be, furtively acquired during the 1990s. It’s a third- or fourth-generation VHS recording from Christmas 1980, shortly after the murder of John Lennon, when it was broadcast late at night on the BBC. As far as I

QuilletteChristopher J. Snowdon

The Universal Structure of Storytelling

Editor’s note: what follows is a lightly edited excerpt of The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down, by Jonathan Gotschall, published by Basic Books (November 2021). In the mid-2000s I set out, along with my colleagues Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, and Da…

QuilletteJonathan Gottschall

How D.B. Cooper and the Golden Age of Air Piracy Changed Aviation Fiction

Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me” was the best-selling album in the United States for five weeks in 1958, but the irony of its popularity (or, perhaps, the source of its aspirational appeal) is that practically none of us could take up the offer to “glide, starry-eyed” on an aircraft

QuilletteKevin Mims

‘We Never Looked Back’: Ruth Wisse on the Jewish Refugees Who Built New Lives in Montreal

After their flight from Egypt, the children of Israel are doomed to spend 40 years in the desert: it takes that long for the whining and backsliding rabble to begin its transformation into a liberated people. The Bible seems to mock their trek from one watering hole to another as

QuilletteRuth R. Wisse

Scapegoating the Private School Boy

The Private School Boy is an object of endless horror and fascination. Every few years, the media outrage cycle will crest towards another scandal—a leaked video of a sexist chant, allegations of sexual misconduct or orgiastic excess—and the discourse machine will dissect the sexual mores of elite t…

QuilletteKasumi Borczyk

Sport

On the Issue of Female Athletics, the IOC Has Shirked Its Duty to Lead

Last week, the Swiss-based International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued updated, non-binding guidance in regard to the inclusion of transgender women and intersex athletes in the female category in elite competitive sports. This IOC Framework on Fairness, Inclusion, and Non-Discrimination on the Bas…

QuilletteDoriane Coleman and Martina Navratilova

Politics

An Outback Conspiracy

We knew that it was probably inevitable. The coronavirus has leapt out of its urban cage into remote indigenous communities in Australia’s Northern Territory. Within the last fortnight, the virus emerged first in the small township of Katherine, then in the Aboriginal camps of Robinson River, Binjar…

QuilletteMatthew Blackwell

Noble Intentions, Counterproductive Results: The Tragic Inefficacy of a Deontological Policy Approach

The Rittenhouse trial reminded us of what we already know: Americans are now more divided than ever. Questions of race, class, and fairness are important, but discourse on these issues tends to be vague, grandiose, and informed by generalities, abstractions, and righteous indignation. This is not he…

QuilletteScott Newman

Zemmour’s Final Word

This year, May 5th marked the 200th anniversary of the death of Napoleon, France’s most famous historical figure and the greatest military leader of the 19th century. The response to the event was as sad as it was predictable. Bonaparte, much of the country’s Left cried, was a

QuilletteRJ Smith

History Lessons from the Toronto Mob Targeting a 19th-Century Gay Icon

In 1793, Alexander Wood emigrated from Scotland to Upper Canada at the age of 21. Within seven years, he had become one of the most successful merchants in York (which eventually would grow into Toronto), a lieutenant in its militia, and a magistrate. He would eventually serve as an acting

QuilletteAllan Stratton

The Sorry State of Political Apologies

Last summer’s George Floyd protests ignited a firestorm of political apologies that continues to blaze. Across the country, local officials from Greensboro to Glendale have been issuing formal statements of apology for historic injustices against African-Americans and other minority groups. Sad to s…

QuilletteMichael McCullough

Podcast

Podcast #173: Batya Ungar-Sargon on the Growing Gulf Between Ordinary Americans and the Progressive Journalists Who Cover Them

Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay talks to Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon about her new book, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy—and her political voyage from doctrinaire progressive to self-described “left-wing populist.”

QuilletteQuillette

Further Reading

Opinion | How Liberals Can Be Happier

They can embrace social institutions like family, religion and local civic organizations.

NYTimesBy

Republicans Are Undermining the Vaccine and Blaming Biden for It

“Why do so many right-wing people distrust the vaccine?” conservatives wonder. It is a mystery.

IntelligencerJonathan Chait

A Cure for Type 1 Diabetes? For One Man, It Seems to Have Worked.

A new treatment using stem cells that produce insulin has surprised experts and given them hope for the 1.5 million Americans living with the disease.

NYTimesBy