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Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture," by Heather MacDonald:


When speakers need police escort on and off college campuses, an alarm bell should be going off that something has gone seriously awry. Of course, an ever-growing part of the faculty is the reason that police protection is needed in the first place. Professors in all but the hardest of hard sciences increasingly indoctrinate students in the belief that to be a non-Asian minority or a female in America today is to be the target of nonstop oppression, even, uproariously, if you are among the privileged few to attend a fantastically well-endowed, resource-rich American college. Those professors also maintain that to challenge that claim of ubiquitous bigotry is to engage in “hate speech” and that such speech is tantamount to a physical assault on minorities and females. As such, it can rightly be suppressed and punished. To those faculty, I am indeed a fascist, and a white supremacist, with the attendant loss of communication rights. 

Hyperbole is part and parcel of political speech. But I would hope that there are some remaining faculty with enough of a lingering connection to reality who would realize that I and other conservatives are not a literal threat to minority students. To try to prevent me or other dissenting intellectuals from connecting with students is simply an effort to maintain the Left’s monopoly of thought. The fact that this suppression goes under the title of “antifascism” is particularly rich. I am reluctant to wield the epithet “fascist” as promiscuously as my declared opponents do. But it must be observed that if campus conservatives tried to use physical force to block Senator Elizabeth Warren from giving a speech, The New York Times would likely put the obstruction on the front page and the term “fascist” would be flying around like a swarm of hornets, followed immediately by the epithet “misogynist.” And when students and their fellow anarchists start breaking glass, destroying businesses, and assaulting perceived opponents, as they did during the Berkeley riots against Milo Yiannopoulos’s scheduled talk in February 2017, and to prevent sociologist Charles Murray from speaking at Middlebury College the following month, it is hard not to hear echoes of 1930s fascism.

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Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," by Stephen Hawking.

A living being like you or me usually has two elements: a set of instructions that tell the system how to keep going and how to reproduce itself, and a mechanism to carry out the instructions. In biology, these two parts are called genes and metabolism. But it is worth emphasising that there need be nothing bio-logical about them. For example, a computer virus is a program that will make copies of itself in the memory of a computer, and will transfer itself to other computers. Thus it fits the definition of a living system that I have given. Like a biological virus, it is a rather degenerate form, because it contains only instructions or genes, and doesn’t have any metabolism of its own. Instead, it reprograms the metabolism of the host computer, or cell. Some people have questioned whether viruses should count as life, because they are parasites, and cannot exist independently of their hosts. But then most forms of life, ourselves included, are parasites, in that they feed off and depend for their survival on other forms of life. I think computer viruses should count as life. Maybe it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. Talk about creating life in our own image.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World," by Bart Ehrman.

Before the triumph of Christianity, the Roman Empire was phenomenally diverse, but its inhabitants shared a number of cultural and ethical assumptions. If one word could encapsulate the common social, political, and personal ethic of the time, it would be “dominance.” 

In a culture of dominance, those with power are expected to assert their will over those who are weaker. Rulers are to dominate their subjects, patrons their clients, masters their slaves, men their women. 

This ideology was not merely a cynical grab for power or a conscious mode of oppression. It was the commonsense, millennia-old view that virtually everyone accepted and shared, including the weak and marginalized. This ideology affected both social relations and governmental policy. It made slavery a virtually unquestioned institution promoting the good of society; it made the male head of the household a sovereign despot over all those under him; it made wars of conquest, and the slaughter they entailed, natural and sensible for the well-being of the valued part of the human race (that is, those invested with power). 

With such an ideology one would not expect to find governmental welfare programs to assist weaker members of society: the poor, homeless, hungry, or oppressed. One would not expect to find hospitals to assist the sick, injured, or dying. One would not expect to find private institutions of charity designed to help those in need. 

The Roman world did not have such things. Christians, however, advocated a different ideology. Leaders of the Christian church preached and urged an ethic of love and service. One person was not more important than another. All were on the same footing before God: the master was no more significant than the slave, the patron than the client, the husband than the wife, the powerful than the weak, or the robust than the diseased. Whether those Christian ideals worked themselves out in practice is another question. Christians sometimes—indeed, many times—spectacularly failed to match their pious sentiments with concrete actions, or, even more, acted in ways contrary to their stated ideals. But the ideals were nonetheless ensconced in their tradition—widely and publicly proclaimed by the leaders of the movement—in ways not extensively found elsewhere in Roman society. 

As Christians came to occupy positions of power, these ideals made their way into people’s social lives, into private institutions meant to encapsulate them, and into governmental policy. The very idea that society should serve the poor, the sick, and the marginalized became a distinctively Christian concern. Without the conquest of Christianity, we may well never have had institutionalized welfare for the poor or organized health care for the sick. Billions of people may never have embraced the idea that society should serve the marginalized or be concerned with the well-being of the needy, values that most of us in the West have simply assumed are “human” values. 

This is not to say that Judaism, the religion from which Christianity emerged, was any less concerned with the obligations to “love your neighbor as yourself” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But neither Judaism nor, needless to say, any of the other great religions of the world took over the empire and became the dominant religion of the West. It was Christianity that became dominant and, once dominant, advocated an ideology not of dominance but of love and service. This affected the history of the West in ways that simply cannot be calculated.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History," by Mitch Landrieu.



The South lost the war and a group of people got together and decided that they were going to adorn the city with monuments that revered those who fought on behalf of a cause that was lost, which they wanted to make seem noble. They were fighting for the right to own and sell black human beings.

I decided that this sanitizing of history must end. The monuments do not represent history, nor the soul of New Orleans. They were not tools for teaching. Instead, they were the product of a warped political movement by wealthy people supporting a mayor who was determined to regain power for white people, to reduce blacks to second-class status, and to control how history was seen, read, and accepted by whites.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Small Fry: A Memoir," by Lisa Brennan Jobs.



By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved thirteen times. We rented spaces informally, staying in a friend’s furnished bedroom here, a temporary sublet there. The last place had become unsuitable when someone had sold the refrigerator without warning. The next day, my mother called my father, asked for more money, and he increased the child support payments by two hundred dollars per month. 

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created," by Jane Leavy.

Babe Ruth swept into the great hall of Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station either with or without two ladies of the night prominently clinging to his arm. He had or had not spent the night before in their company. Did or did not pat them on the derrière and tip them effusively, calling out to a pal among the assembled scribes, photogs, hangers-on, autograph addicts, and redcaps gathered to see him off: “Coupla beauts, eh?” 

Christy Walsh thrust himself into the scrum. Among other things, it was his job to make sure the story remained an either/or—either it wouldn’t find its way into print until long after they were all dead or it would be forgotten in a blitz of favorable mentions of the visits Walsh had arranged to hospitals and orphanages, where Babe would be photographed being his best self. Most Americans still thought the Babe was a happily married man—the photos of Dorothy and Helen in the stands at Games 3 and 4 helped. Walsh could count on the discretion of the beat guys on the payroll of the Christy Walsh Syndicate who doubled as Ruth’s ghosts, but not on their editors. Not anymore. Not since Joe Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, America’s first tabloid, plastered photos of Babe’s mistress, Claire Hodgson, on page 1 in August 1925. And not with Bernarr Macfadden of True Story fame bankrolling New York’s newest scandal sheet, the New York Evening Graphic—known around town as the Porno-Graphic.

Lazy Linking, 230th in an Occasional Series

Stuff I liked on the Internets:

230.1 Cool explanation + data viz on how food goes from farm to table @conversationus bit.ly/2PnFVVr

230.2 Digging this book of pics of black & white murals on old buildings @thisiscolossal bit.ly/36zEb14

230.3 National Park Service experimenting w/new engagement strategies to connect locals to park planning efforts in Boston @nextcityorg bit.ly/2RNdUIp

230.4 Using differences in enforcement of "one child" policy to understand abandonment/abduction rates @ssrn bit.ly/36x57OJ

230.5 Now that I'm a month from 47, this list of ordinary things that will cause your 40+ year old self to get injured is not funny at all @mcsweeneys bit.ly/2tgUyRK

2019 Books I've Read

Here are my ratings for the books I read in the past 12 months.  In case you've forgotten, the scale goes like this: 1 - pass, 2 - some good some bad, 3 - recommended, 4 - can't stop raving about it, 5 - fundamentally changed my worldview.  (There were a couple of "5's" this year!)

Please weigh in with recommendations.  If you have been following this list over the years, you see an evolution in greater diversity in authors and topics, although still overwhelmingly non-fiction.  I welcome hearing about must-reads.

New Year's Resolutions

Since 2011, I’ve posted my New Year’s resolutions at the end of each year.  It’s a good way to do a year-end check-up and see how I did and what I need to recommit to into the New Year.  So without further ado:

1. Body - run 800 miles, swim 80 miles, lift 160 times, bike 800 miles, eat better.

I still have a sweet tooth, and my morning workouts are usually sparked by routine rather than joy.  But I’m doing right by myself.  My workout tallies for 1/1/19-12/1/19: ran 774.7 mi, swam 63.6 mi, lifted 145 times, biked 732.3 mi.  Grade: A.

I Live in the Best Neighborhood in the World

I have used this space and other platforms to sing the praises of my neighborhood.  It is wonderful how often I get to talk up University City at work, as an impressive concentration of knowledge activity, research infrastructure, and innovative start-ups.  I remain eternally grateful that my kids can attend a wonderful and diverse neighborhood school that is a less than five minute walk from our front door.  And we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to transit options to get to work and play, saving the environment and saving me from the headache of traffic congestion and road rage in the process.

2020 Predictions Guaranteed or Your Money Back

It’s time to gaze into the ol’ crystal ball, say crazy stuff, and hope that no one checks after the fact.

But first, these were my predictions from a year ago:

1. The cause engendering the broadest and most passionate support will be...vegetarianism in response to animal cruelty.  Not sure this came true, but we did get the Impossible Burger so I’ll give myself partial credit.

2. A privacy breach of epic and embarrassing proportions will put a major chill in the market for at-home personal assistants, but someone one of the devices will emerge unscathed and develop a market leadership position.  General privacy concerns, yes.  Embarrassing breach, not really one singular one.  One device corners the market, not so much. 

3. Innovation is too incremental to make a prediction like this, but I firmly believe 2019 will go down in history in our battles against cancer, Alzheimer's, and heart disease.  Cell and gene therapy is advancing at a promising pace.  Perhaps the history books will look kindly at the progress we made in 2019.

4. You thought the Kavanaugh confirmations were something else?  We're going to see another Supreme Court vacancy in the coming year and once again the process will be a doozy.  RBG is still alive, so maybe this flips to 2020.

5. Alabama will lose a game, the Warriors won't win the title, and the Nationals will win their first ever World Series (naturally the year Bryce Harper leaves for free agency).  Wow, I nailed this one!  3 for 3!

Checks and Balances

My annual habit of writing letters to Congress took a detour last year, when I wrote a post about Congress, which you can find here.  Fast forward to today, and I am similarly blah about writing a letter to my electeds in the traditional sense of advocating on a particular issue.  What I have been mulling over is what to do with our current president, which is a subject I do want to address my representatives in Washington on.

Even though I am a registered Republican, I did not vote for Donald Trump, I do not plan to vote for him next November, and I do not agree with almost all of his policy positions.  Indeed, I find many of his policies so abhorrent that they are worthy of the protest, resistance, and legal challenges they have provoked.