
Why Culture Matters for Racial Disparities
In the 1980s, the National Basketball Association (NBA) experienced a revival in fan interest sparked by a hyped team rivalry between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, and by the personal rivalry between their two respective superstars, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Bird is white, Johnson is black,

Why We Should Read Machiavelli
In the mid-1990s, film critic David Denby wrote Great Books, in which he recounted a year spent at Columbia University taking two core courses in the humanities that focused on “Western classics” written by so-called “Dead White European Males.” It was “thirty years after [Denby entered] Columbia University for the

The Economic Illiteracy of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was compared to Donald Trump in her “ability to galvanize [her] supporters through social media.” To this she replied: “In order to resonate with people, you have to tell them what you mean, you have to be willing

How My Toxic Stoicism Helped Me Cope with Brain Cancer
Under normal circumstances—e.g. in a time when the American Psychological Association (APA) has not released guidelines questioning whether norms associated with “traditional masculinity” (e.g. stoicism) are harmful to the mental health of men, and a shaving commercial is not being run that criticizes “toxic masculinity”—I would