Samuel Kronen - Quillette

Eminem in a train carriage, holding a rubbish

Slim Shady’s Blues

Eminem’s music helped him to cope with his own suffering. It also helped his listeners cope with theirs.

Samuel Kronen

18 Feb 2025 · 10 min read

A creepy blurred photo of a person's face and a furry hood.

The Psychologisation Pandemic

Denial of “invisible” suffering is bad science and worse ethics.

Samuel Kronen

4 Nov 2024 · 18 min read

‘A Dream Deferred’ Revisited

Shelby Steele’s masterful second book invites black America to reject redemptive liberalism and the helplessness it demands for a humanistic politics of advancement.

Samuel Kronen

22 Aug 2023 · 17 min read

Fate, Faith, and Suffering

Coping is not enough. We must strive to live.

Samuel Kronen

5 Sep 2022 · 27 min read

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the Meaning of Human Suffering

Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.

Samuel Kronen

28 Oct 2021 · 27 min read

Historical Racism Is Not the Singular Cause of Racial Disparity

The popular vision of race in America seems to be incapable of breaking the gridlock that places the fate of black Americans in the hands of white society and then condemns that society to the wasteland of history.

Samuel Kronen

17 Jul 2021 · 26 min read

Black Lives Matter and the Psychology of Progressive Fatalism

There is nothing wrong with elevating anti-racism in one’s own life. But there is something wrong with imposing one’s moral reality upon total strangers.

Samuel Kronen

28 May 2021 · 18 min read

James Baldwin and the Trouble with Protest Literature

“The hardest thing in the world to do,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in a 1934 article for Esquire, “is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn and anybody is

Samuel Kronen

2 May 2021 · 24 min read

Thomas Sowell: Tragic Optimist

In his 2000 memoir A Personal Odyssey, Sowell recounts a parable that was read to him as a young boy and which he never forgot.

Samuel Kronen

27 Mar 2021 · 29 min read

The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Conor McGregor

MMA represents a meeting of cultures and individuals that transcend identity, class, and geography while integrating art and philosophy with sport—a healthy pressure valve in the modern world.

Samuel Kronen

25 Feb 2021 · 17 min read

The Tragic Vision: Making the Best of Things

The denial of tragedy inevitably results in the denial of what makes us human, snipping the invisible thread that connects us to the lives of other people and draining the individual of moral gravity.

Samuel Kronen

31 Jan 2021 · 13 min read

"I Was Never More Hated Than When I Tried to Be Honest"

Allergic to narrow-mindedness, poor taste, and moral arrogance, Ellison detested any kind of racial essentialism, separatism, and determinism.

Samuel Kronen

28 Dec 2020 · 26 min read

Reinventing Racism—A Review

Beyond dismantling the ideas in White Fragility, Church leverages his background in economics to forward a more comprehensive framework around privilege.

Samuel Kronen

30 Nov 2020 · 7 min read

The Prescience of Shelby Steele

A great writer shows us how to think rather than telling us what to think.

Samuel Kronen

8 Oct 2020 · 18 min read

On Race and Inequality—A Reply to Nathan J. Robinson

The reality is that virtually no two ethnic groups in history have ever achieved equal outcomes on all measures, anywhere, ever.

Samuel Kronen

27 Jun 2020 · 10 min read