Culture Wars
The Culture War is Coming for Your Genes
In the opening pages of The Genetic Lottery, Dr Kathryn Paige Harden sets out her mission: “What I am aiming to do in this book is re-envision the relationship between genetic science and equality. … I will argue that the science of individual differences is compatible with full-throated egalitarianism.” In this
The Good Death—Cancel Culture and the Logic of Torture
Cancellation is a public execution, during which a person is pilloried and destroyed. But while we have become used to the cycle of manufactured outrage that preludes every cancellation, the desperate public apologies, and the devastating consequences for the people whose lives are ruined, we are often at a loss
Luxury Belief Systems and Economic Stagnation: The Recipe for Our Discontent
In his 1950 book Unpopular Essays, Bertrand Russell divides the misfortunes that can befall humanity into two general categories—those inflicted by nature, and those inflicted by other humans. As he points out, for most of human existence a good chunk of our suffering was caused by nature—things like
Watching America’s Crack-Up
When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly different from anywhere else. One can call this perspective, but it is more a recognition
The Society of Cultural Anthropology’s Campaign to Present American Populism as Fascism
Earlier this year, the Society of Cultural Anthropology (SCA)—a subdivision of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)—published a series of essays exploring the topic of American Fascism. The project was run under the SCA’s “Hot Spots” category, which editors at the SCA’s journal, Cultural Anthropology, dedicate to
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
Vaccines and the Coronavirus Crank Crisis
When I last wrote about the rise of the coronavirus cranks for Quillette on January 16th, there were 37,000 people in British hospitals with COVID-19, and 1,411 COVID-related deaths on that day alone. The story that self-described sceptics had been telling themselves since the summer was a smoking
The Faith of Systemic Racism
We hear constantly about the systemic racism coursing through America. Everything, we’re told, is shot through with hate. It does not matter if no white person ever has actually thought a hateful thought. The structure, or system, these innocents inhabit and profit from was designed by those who hated
