Quillette’s Top 10 of 2021

Welcome to Quillette's most popular articles of the year measured by number of pageviews from January 1 - December 26, 2021. We hope you enjoy them.

Number 1:

Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America | Glenn Loury

“Blacks are being treated like infants whom one dares not to touch. One dares not say the wrong word in front of us; to ask any question that might offend us; to demand anything from us, for fear that we will be so adversely impacted by that.”

Number 2:

The Campaign of Lies Against Journalist Jesse Singal—And Why It Matters | Jonathan Kay

“This sort of openly trollish campaign of abuse has been normalized as an acceptable advocacy tactic—even as these same activists will claim... that incorrect word choices can inflict unfathomable psychic damage on transgender individuals.”

Number 3:

Rise of the Coronavirus Cranks | Christopher J. Snowdon

“Of course lockdowns don’t make the epidemic disappear and of course there are less restrictive policies that can reduce the caseload, but the claim that they don’t work at all is, to put it charitably, disingenuous.”

Number 4:

Leaving Portland | Michael J. Totten

“Roughly 2.5 million people live in the Portland metropolitan area, and downtown has been wrecked by maybe 200 anarchists, a percentage of the population that’s vanishingly close to zero point zero. This should not be a difficult problem to solve.”

Number 5:

Can Governments Stop Bitcoin? | Alex Gladstein

“No one can arbitrarily change [Bitcoin's] rules or decide to print more. Driven by self-interest, Wall Street may ironically end up being one of the biggest cheerleaders of this new technology that Washington can’t control.”

Number 6:

The Evolutionary Advantages of Playing Victim | Cory Clark

“Habitual, false victim signalers deplete available resources for genuine victims, dupe trusting others into misallocating their resources, and can initiate a dysfunctional cycle of competitive victimhood.”

Number 7:

Mate Selection for Modernity | Vincent Harinam

“There's a disconnect between what women want and what is actually available to them. Whereas greater male attainment increases the number of romantic options a man has, greater female attainment reduces the number of options a woman has.”

Number 8:

Fifty Years of Fear and Loathing | Davis S. Willis

“Thompson was keen to criticise the naïve hippie mysticism of Timothy Leary and others who recommended powerful drugs as a form of spiritual liberation. For Thompson, drugs were messy but fun; a necessary release from the daily grind.”

Number 9:

Looking for COVID-19 ‘Miracle Drugs’? We Already Have Them. They’re Called Vaccines | Claire Berlinski and Yuri Deigin

“If there were no pandemic, Weinstein and other vaccine skeptics would be perfectly right to say that getting vaccinated is riskier than not getting vaccinated. But we don’t live in a fictional universe: There is a pandemic, and a deadly one.”

Number 10:

For Our Own Good, We All Need a Glimpse of the Evil Queen | Jordan Peterson

“We must confront the unknown, as such—the great Dragon of Chaos or the Terrible Queen—and we do not know how to do it, to begin with. The dream serves as the first cognitive step...in transforming that unknown into actionable and articulable knowledge.”