A collection of 119 posts
A Review of Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart by Nancy L. Segal. Rowman & Littlefield, 520 pages (November, 2021) When I first heard about the Louise Wise Services-Child Development Center (LWS-CDC) twin study, I was shocked but also skeptical. A doctor had separated
How will dropping to one’s knees and admitting one’s privilege end the mass incarceration of black Americans caused by the disastrous failure of the War on Drugs?
A review of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy by Batya Ungar-Sargon. Encounter, 312 pages. (October 2021) In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek (where, full disclosure, she has published two of my essays), argues that elite left-wing
The truth is we can never hope for a perfect alignment between moral desert and material reward because we each have competing definitions of what constitutes merit.
Five decades after its release, Wake in Fright remains a brutally captivating reminder that modernity is just a thin veneer over the darker recesses of the human heart.
The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan returns those nations willing to fight evil to their couches, where they can sigh in safety.
Woolf’s depiction of these inner rhythms would be refined in the novels that followed—To the Lighthouse and The Waves—but Dalloway was the true birth of this form.
Amis is in love with English, and the marriage is a healthy one.
Embery offers a plan to implement his vision of a well ordered and prosperous country that values its conservative Somewhere members as much as its Anywhere cultural and economic elite.
Freak Power is a fascinating look into the heart of a grassroots political campaign during a violent era in American history, as one man channelled the rage and confusion of a maligned subculture into a surprisingly coherent and subversive political movement.
Reasonably minded readers who have followed the unraveling of Garrison’s assassination probe over the years will likely wonder how anyone ever believed him or allowed him to ruin the life of an entirely innocent man, New Orleans businessman and preservationist Clay Shaw.
The book explains a half-century arc of intellectual history culminating in our current state of histrionic overreach in the name of social justice.
Tarantino is quintessentially American. He lets us linger and watch Tate in all her Technicolor radiance. He lets us love her. What’s more, he lets her watch and love herself.
The sordid and shameful history of eugenics in the U.S. should be better known, as should the role of another prominent American institution that was central to the development of eugenics ideology.
If you haven’t seen Endgame yet—or if you take comfort in the delusion that Marvel is “woke”—stop reading now.