Bad News—A Review
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
Injecting Anti-Racism Activism Into the Adoption Process Won’t Help Black Children
A headline on Newsweek’s web site grabbed my attention in early May: “Wokeness Has Come for Adoption. It’s the Children Who Will Suffer.” This is a subject I know well: My wife and I have fostered three child refugees—from Zimbabwe, Guatemala, and Honduras respectively. These foster children
From Playboy Sports Star to Islamist Politician: The Strange Turn of Imran Khan
The values trajectory of Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan is scarcely believable. Born into a well-to-do family in the new country of Pakistan, five years after the independence and partition of India, Khan received a prestigious education at the elite Aitchison College in Lahore and then at Oxford University. Like
Vaccine Rejectionism and the Left
For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful. … Theorizing about “the social construction
Cancel Culture Has a Lot to Answer For
Sometimes our most precious cultural institutions fail to live up to their high educational and moral commitments and responsibilities. These failures especially damage the social fabric because they tend to harm many people who rely on them and tarnish the high ideals that the institutions claim to exemplify. An incident
Studying the True Face of Gender Ideology
This week, progressive British activist Jo Maugham warned his 300,000-plus Twitter followers of “yet another vast, and vastly expensive, piece of anti-trans infrastructure” that had been erected “virtually overnight, with zero transparency.” The tweet went viral, even though, as many commenters noted, it was unclear what supposed anti-trans leviathan
Autonomous Vehicles: Hype or Reality?
Automobile accidents are the second leading cause of death worldwide, with roughly 1.3 million fatalities annually according to the World Health Organization. China accounts for roughly 260,000 of those and the United States roughly 40,000. Car ownership is growing in developing countries, which will increase the number
Weekly Roundup
Welcome to our 665 new subscribers! This week I'd like to draw your attention to a terrific piece written by Joel Kotkin on the global supply chain crunch and what it means for the future of globalisation. And there is an excruciating account by Maxwell Meyer on the self-immolation of
