The very thoughtful Thomas Chatterton Williams, who I quoted in yesterday’s post about Ta-Nehisi Coates, has his own response to Coates’ Atlantic essay in The American Scholar. It’s worth reading the whole, relatively short, article. But two passages stand out: Coates “claims for himself, here and elsewhere, a Mullah-like authority to assert communal possession of
The latest installment of The Confessions of Saint Ta-Nehisi Coates, appearing yesterday in The Atlantic, takes the form of a jeremiad against the iniquities of Kanye West. Embedded in lengthy autobiographical ruminations that have become his trademark, Coates reflects on his memories of Michael Jackson, and how Jackson "had always been dying—dying to be white.
Last night, I got to hear Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, author of the best-selling 12 Rules for Life, speak at the Warner Theater in downtown Washington, DC. Before a packed house, he gave a 90-minute extemporaneous lecture on consciousness, honesty, setting goals, empathy, self-discipline, and the problem of not seeing gorillas. Peterson is on a worldwide
Journalism—the "professional" kind, the sort taught at the Columbia School of Journalism—is dead. Yet, zombie-like, it shambles on, eating the brains of both its consumers and its practitioners. There is a short but brutal chapter on journalists in Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game. You can trust Taleb's judgment for the most part because he
Fans of the fantastic HBO series "Westworld" (the second season of which just started) will know that when one of the cyborg "hosts" encounters something that conflicts with its programming it will intone, "Doesn't look like anything to me." This response bears an uncanny resemblance to how the leftist collective deals with any news it can't
A few months ago, Dave Rubin (one of the best podcast interviewers on YouTube ) spoke with the African-American writer and producer Candace Owens about how she was "red-pilled" and became a conservative. Last week, Owens spoke at UCLA where she responded to the Black Lives Matters hecklers in the audience by rejecting the victim
The amazing Thomas Sowell influenced me deeply when I was a young man, and at 87 he is still going strong. The first part of his new interview with Dave Rubin was just posted today. You won’t regret it.
A few weeks ago, in my northwest Washington D.C. neighborhood, I witnessed a most curious motorcade driving down Connecticut Avenue, transporting what appeared to be a very large crate. It turns out that “Spike,” the National Zoo’s new Asian elephant, was being delivered to his new home Today, instead of a zoo, the nation will
I’m not the first to observe that those on the left who seem to want open war with their domestic enemies are slightly mad. Among other considerations, which side has all the guns? The always insightful Richard Fernandez (who seems to have concluded that the cold civil war is doomed to become hot) notes that
Contrary to what many sheltered millennials seem to think, bigotry and prejudice were not simply given a free pass in the bad old days of my youth. The way we dealt with them was just different and, arguably, better. For instance, at one time, if someone said something offensive about a particular class of
