Yes, I know I should be moralizing about teenage white boys from Kentucky, but I’d rather be writing about New York Jews. Because I gotta be me! My kvetch du jour is a lengthy piece by Columbia University professor Stephen Wertheim appearing a few weeks ago in the New York Review of Books’s NYR Daily,…
Search Results for: THOMAS FRIEDMAN
Harvard douchebaggery not exclusively a left-wing phenomenon, study reveals
Well, it did. I did the study, and I’m revealing it. In fact, I already revealed it last week, with my takedown of right-wing Harvard douchebag N. Gregory Mankiw for trying to make us feel sorry for trust-fund babies. Well, now I have a new study, and it seems that there’s a goddamn outbreak of…
I predicted this!
Ah, the temptations, if the not the complacencies, of the peignoir pundit! About six weeks ago, I took a punch at Fareed Zakaria for waxing too credulous over the might and power of a disciplined China, something folks as varied as Thomas Friedman and Barack Obama are wont to do. I suggested to Mr. Zakaria…
Solar Panels—the drama continues
Was ever an industry so fraught as the solar panel industry? Spectacular flameouts of Obama-subsidized, Obama-connected, state-of-the-art, industry-of-tomorrow outfits like the renowned though now alas defunct Solyndra, charges and counter-charges of “unlawful” subsidies (i.e., bigger, or at least more effective than ours) made by, among, and between the U.S., Europe, and China, and now perhaps the…
China, land of the future
A three-hundred foot section of a ramp leading to a 9.6-mile bridge over the Songhua River collapsed today, nine months after the bridge opened, the New York Times reports. It’s the sixth major bridge to collapse this year. Last year, a crash involving a brand-new high speed rail line cost the lives of 40 people….
David Rieff, assigning blame where blame is due, some of the time
Over at Foreign Affairs, David Rieff has a rather portentous, even penumbral, take on world events, notably the concurrent U.S. disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking a few pokes at the liberal optimism that brought these about. Dave’s nut graph, or perhaps “money shot,” is quite prolonged, but, well, in for a penny, in for…
The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? Part II Part 2: Matthew Continetti and The Right
A few years ago, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, in response to a couple of engaging (relatively) meas culpas—Matthew Continetti’s The Right The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism and Tim Miller’s Why We Did It—I began preparing an update. I originally planned to…
CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.
OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I…
Colin Powell, a four-star disappointment
The death of Colin Powell at age 84 has brought forth lots of eulogies and a few accurate criticisms, like this one, posted at Forever Wars by Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America And Produced Trump. Ackerman focuses almost exclusively on what one might call the “mysterious incident…
Does the libertarian movement need a kick in the pants? Or is it just Nick Gillespie?
Sorry, Nick, but if you give Literature R Us an opening for a cheap shot, we’re going to take it. Nick incautiously let his guard down last month with a post in Reason, “The Libertarian Movement Needs a Kick in the Pants”, in itself a riposte, as it were, to Tyler Cowen’s thought-, if not…