Originally published in Compact. The Messageby Ta-Nehisi CoatesOne World, 256 pages Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fundamental problem is that he is a narcissist. Other people interest him only insofar as they reflect his own thoughts and feelings. That is what makes him such a bad reporter, a Read More
Originally published in the Claremont Review of Books. The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremismby Eric KaufmannBombardier Books, 418 pages The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Destroying Americaby Jeremy CarlRegnery, 400 pages In the history of American race relations, discrete Read More
Originally published in The American Conservative. The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying Noby Carl ElliottW.W. Norton, 368 pages If I told you that doctors had injected live cancer cells into elderly Jewish patients, including Holocaust survivors, without their consent for Read More
Originally published in The American Conservative. The year 1994 marked the beginning of the era of globalization. For a short time after the end of the Cold War, it was unclear what would be the driving theme of the next period in history. Then it Read More
Originally published in The Lamp. There was no such thing as “human resources” before 1958, when the term first appeared in print in an academic paper. The art of keeping one’s workforce in good order used to be called “personnel management” or “industrial relations,” and Read More
Originally published in The American Conservative. Are we fighting in Ukraine in order to “queer the Donbass”? That phrase, which I believe originated with TAC’s editor-at-large Rod Dreher, implies that the ideological package that NATO rallied to Ukraine to defend includes not only freedom and Read More
Originally published in Compact magazine. Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern AsiaBy Gary J. BassKnopf, 917 pages, $46 Gary J. Bass, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, thinks that the last seven decades of history Read More
Originally published at The American Conservative. Donald Fagen, the lead singer of Steely Dan, tells a story about the poet Anthony Hecht that does not appear in David Yezzi’s new biography. In 1966, “my formerly tweedy, graying poetry professor, Anthony Hecht,” returned for the fall Read More
Originally published in The American Conservative. Pandemics have a way of falling out of historical memory. President George W. Bush read historian John Barry’s book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History over vacation at his Crawford ranch in 2004; when he got Read More
Originally published in The American Conservative. Is it racist to think that a Chinese person is more likely to spy for China than someone with no Chinese ancestry who was born in America? That was the premise of much of the left-wing opposition to the Read More