Here we go again—that old, familiar, sinking feeling. The one I get whenever yet another generally sensible and humane thinker whom I admire succumbs to the “Darwinitis” epidemic.(1) Who is it this time? Roger Scruton—of all people—I am sorry to say. Scruton is that great rarity—a truly independent man of letters. His philosophcal rigor, his [...]

Denis Dutton, who died just one month ago, was clearly a man of parts. He was a professor of philosophy, specializing in aesthetics, at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. But he is undoubtedly best known as the founder of Arts & Letters Daily, a sort of high-brow Reader’s Digest for the digital age. As [...]

In yesterday’s “Is intelligence inherited? Is the race to the swift?” (Jan. 28), I talked about Charles Murray’s essay, ”The New American Divide,” on the growing lifestyle gap between the middle class and the working class in America: Working class communities in the United States are not clinging bitterly to guns and religion; quite the opposite. They [...]

Recently, James Barham wrote about the growing class divide in the United States, in “The Parable of Belmont and Fishtown,” as portrayed by Charles Murray in his essay “The New American Divide” and a forthcoming book. Every American ought to pay attention to the class divide Murray delineates because it reveals an important truth that [...]

The education-reform debate in this country has a surreal quality to it. It’s as though an epidemic were raging in a city, but nobody knew what was causing it, so nobody could agree on what to do to put a stop to it. Except that we do know what the problem is. At least, those [...]

According to the fashionable new theory of “ego depletion,” our willpower is a “scarce resource” directly linked to the glucose level in our body. Need extra willpower to fight off that temptation to eat a candy bar? Solution: Eat a candy bar! * * * Seriously, though, what does the theory say? In a 1998 [...]

Sebastian Thrun has seen the future of higher education—and it works. The well-known Google Fellow and developer of that company’s driverless robotic car, has just announced he is resigning his position in Stanford’s AI Lab in order to work full-time on a start-up venture known as Udacity.com, otherwise known as “University 2.0.” Thrun’s decision followed upon his [...]

“America is coming apart.” So begins a blistering editorial by Charles Murray in The Wall Street Journal last Saturday (Jan. 21). And if you think that sounds alarmist, wait till you hear the rest of what he has to say. Murray, a political scientist now with the American Enterprise Institute, has been a stimulating if controversial presence on [...]

* * * “The GOP wants to put big government in your bedroom.” * * * “Right-wing legislators control women’s bodies.” * * * Naturally, we are all used to hearing such rhetoric from left-wing politicians. From philosophers, though, we have a right to expect something better. That is why I was a little shocked [...]

Last week, the unthinkable happened—Wikipedia went dark. People who needed a high-level overview of Klingon love poetry were simply out of luck. This outage was not the result of a server failure; no hackers were involved. Rather, the blackout was an act of protest. It was a desperate act, and it has proven to be [...]