Charles Murray’s ‘Facing Reality’—A Review
A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021)
I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the
Charles Murray’s ‘Facing Reality’—A Review
A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021) I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the New Republic the instant it was shelved. It was here that I stumbled upon the shocking views Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein expressed in The Bell Curve about race, class, and inequality in America. I didn’t give those views much deep thought at the time, and so my perception of Murray and his ideas hewed more or less to the dismissive conventional wisdom. It wasn’t until I read a 1998 essay in Commentary magazine by Christopher Chabris that I began to reconsider. Chabris argued that the media furor around The Bell Curve obscured more than it illuminated, and that the consensus among psychologists on the importance of intelligence to life outcomes was indeed close to what Murray and Herrnstein had asserted. To my surprise, in the 21st century, my relationship …
Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control revisits a time, the legacy of which still haunts us. Spanning the period between January of 2020 and late spring of 2020, his new documentary traces the rise of the pandemic which has become a defining feature of our time. A Totally Under Control—A Review
Totally Under Control—the new pandemic documentary written by Alex Gibney, and co-directed by Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger—covers the period between January and late spring of 2020. It traces the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and examines the dismal response of the American political elite. On January 21st, the headline in the New York Times read “China Confirms New Coronavirus Spreads From Humans to Humans.” The full horror of mass deaths and economic lockdown hadn’t yet dawned on the world, and even in Wuhan there wasn’t full comprehension of what was to come. The following day, President Donald Trump was asked if he was worried by the pandemic. “We have it totally under control,” he replied. This declaration has not aged well, and Totally Under Control details the bungling, the mismanagement, and the incoherence of the Trump administration’s response—a chronicle of a dance between COVID-19 and the White House that has claimed over 240,000 American lives as of this writing. As a point of contrast, the documentary also examines …
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The Evolutionary History of Man’s Best Friend Revealed
Man and dog share a long history. In much of the world, a history as old as humanity. The latest genetic evidence now tells us that the emergence of the domestic dog lineage occurred soon after the human expansion out of Africa 50,000 years ago, in the depths of
Not All Identities Are Created Equal
In 2020, much of the public discussion of social issues revolves around notions of identity. Ideas about race, reformulations of gender, and considerations of class or religious confession. But it is not often stated that these identity categories are qualitatively different, and these differences have different implications for the real