Show me the evidence:

I spent some time on the phone and emailing with Steven Levitt back in 1999, so I think I can explain the origin of his abortion-cuts-crime theory pretty fairly. After he became a father for the first time, he started thinking about the huge number of legal abortions, tens of millions over the last several decades. (My impression is that he is more pro-life than pro-choice).

So, he thought to himself, That must have had some kind of effect on society. (Actually, plausible as that sounds, as his further research showed, most of those abortions were of fetuses that wouldn't have been conceived if abortion hadn't been legalized, so the actual effect on who is alive today isn't as large, or at least it's not as direct, as he'd originally assumed.)

So, he thought to himself: what's changed that's driving down the crime rate in the later 1990s. How about the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s? Criminals tend to be in their early 20s, so the timing seems right.

He looked at some crime data for 1985 and 1997, and noticed that crime had declined more on average in high abortion states like New York. So, he and John J. Donohue wrote up a draft paper suggesting abortion cut crime and started discussing it at academic conferences, where it got a respectful hearing. In August of 1999, the paper got leaked to the Chicago Tribune, which splashed it big.

It struck me when I read it as possible but not for certain, so I started looking into it. Greg Cochran pointed out that if you look at murder rates per year over the century, they go up and down a lot long before abortion was legalized. With that in mind, I started looking at the murder rates by age cohort and it quickly jumped out at me that they had gone through a vast upheaval between 1985 and 1997 that overwhelmed any effect related to abortion: namely, the crack wars.

Young men born in the years after legalization (1970 in NY and California, where the crack wars got started, 1973 in the rest of the country) became extraordinarily murderous in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You could hardly attribute the post-legalization cohort's better behavior in the late 1990s to abortion being legalized without also attributing to abortion their horrible behavior in the early 1990s. If there is an abortion effect, common sense says that it should impact people earlier in life, rather than later when all sorts of other factors have had more time to have an impact. But it was the post-legalization young who went on the worst youth murder spree in American history. In fact, you could make just about as strong a case that the legalization of abortion contributed to the murder spree by post-legalization youth.

Why did crime go down earlier in high abortion states? The cracks wars tended to burn out earliest in places where they got started earliest, which typically were high abortion cities that had had liberal politics, like NYC, LA, and Washington D.C. (where abortion was de facto legal from 1970 onward). Meanwhile, the crack wars spread in the 1990s to more conservative, low-abortion states in the hinterland, driving up the crime rate there.

This news came as a surprise to Levitt when we debated his theory in Slate in 1999, because he hadn't really thought about what happened in between his datapoints in 1985 and 1997, even though it was huge news at the time.

This is where the story gets mysterious. Rather than say, Oh, well, it was just an unpublished paper, Levitt kept on pushing his abortion-cut-crime idea, making that the most hyped element in his book Freakonomics, despite having lots of other material that he could have given the primary emphasis to instead.

He's never come up with simple answers to my challenges. He's instead upped the statistical complexity level of his explanations to the point where people generally feel they have to take his explanations on faith. He's nice guy, so lots of people decide to trust him rather than go through all the work of crunching the numbers for themselves. But, under the mild-mannered exterior, he does have a bit of a stubborn ego, which I guess is the solution to the mystery. The shame is that he's a bright guy and doesn't need this one theory to make his reputation.

So, here's some new data that I don't think has ever been published in a readable table before It's the FBI's homicide offending rates per 100,000, with columns being ages (even ages only) and the rows being the approximate birth years (for the full table, click here). Pick an age out and scan down and see if you can see if legalization (1970-1973) had an effect that you can notice. (For graphs of this data, click here.)

	Homicide Offending Rates by Birth Year by Age 1980-2002
		Age
		14	16	18	20	22	24	26	28	30
Approx. Birth Year	1958					29	24	18	19	18
	1959					24	20	18	19	18
	1960				31	25	22	21	18	20
	1961				27	23	21	17	19	20
	1962			28	27	22	19	18	19	17
	1963			27	25	21	22	18	21	16
	1964		16	24	25	24	22	20	18	15
	1965		14	24	25	26	22	21	20	15
	1966	4	14	19	30	26	26	23	17	14
	1967	4	14	19	31	28	25	21	18	13
	1968	3	11	24	39	31	23	19	16	12
	1969	4	13	26	39	37	26	17	13	12
CA, NY Legalized	1970	3	15	30	41	33	26	17	14	11
	1971	3	16	37	53	37	26	16	13	11
	1972	4	21	49	51	33	23	17	13	13
Roe v. Wade	1973	5	24	61	56	34	23	14	14
	1974	6	32	57	52	33	21	18	15
	1975	7	34	61	47	29	18	17
	1976	7	36	62	45	28	20	19
	1977	8	39	50	40	27	20
	1978	8	38	48	40	26	22
	1979	10	32	42	34	26
	1980	9	25	35	35	27
	1981	8	21	32	37
	1982	6	15	29	35
	1983	4	13	33
	1984	3	11	25

I've put in bold the maximum murder rate for each age group. For 14 year olds, for example, the worst cohort was those born in about 1979 (so, their peak murder year was around 1993). For 16 year olds, 1977. For 18 year olds -- and the highest murder rate for any age -- was for those born about 1976 (peaking about 1994). For 20 year olds, 1973. For 22 year olds, 1969 and 1971. And so forth.

What you can see is that there were two murder peaks over the last 30 years. The first was the powder cocaine wars that peaked around 1980, when the killers tended to be in their 20s and older. The second was the vast crack cocaine wars that peaked around 1990-1994, and the killers became progressively younger as the wars went on.

The crack wars were fought much more by teenagers than the earlier crime waves, and most of those were born after legalization in their region, especially because of how much the early legalizing of abortion New York area dominated the crack wars in the early years. What made the crack years so murderous was the entry into the killing of so many teens -- exactly the generation that was theorized by Levitt to have been culled by abortion into law-abidingness.

Now, the abortion rate was higher in the later 1970s than right after legalization, so I suppose Levitt could argue that there just wasn't enough abortion after legalization for the Levitt Effect to work its magic. But, the abortion rate for blacks went up quite fast right after legalization (probably because of urbanization), and it was of course young black males whose homicide rate went through the roof during the crack wars. So, that's not a very persuasive argument. Black fetuses were getting aborted in very large numbers in the mid-1970s, but the survivors are exactly among whom the murder rate rose the most during the crack wars.

So, look at that table and if you can see the Levitt Effect, let me know because I sure can't.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"History is written not so much by the victors as by the writers of history"

In Slate.com, Pressbox columnist Jack Shafer writes:

In Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, Laurel Leff [a professor of Journalism at Northeaster] condemns Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger for keeping the Nazis' atrocities against the Jews off Page One during World War II... "No American newspaper was better positioned to highlight the Holocaust than the Times, and no American newspaper so influenced public discourse by its failure to do so," she writes.

Buried by the Times makes the most persuasive case against the paper, arguing that it failed in its journalistic mission by not explaining that Hitler was killing Jews because they were Jews. Leff counts 1,186 stories about the Jews of Europe in the paper between the war's start in 1939 and its conclusion in 1945. Only 26 of those stories made it to Page One, and only six of them explicitly stated that Jews were the main target of the Nazis.

By the time the paper celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2001, it agreed so fully with Leff's assessment that former executive editor Max Frankel cited her work in a Times feature.

"No single explanation seems to suffice for what was surely the century's bitterest journalistic failure. The Times, like most media of that era, fervently embraced the wartime policies of the American and British governments, both of which strongly resisted proposals to rescue Jews or to offer them haven," Frankel writes.

Frankel wrote in 2001 in a 150th anniversary retrospective on the history of the New York Times:

AND then there was failure: none greater than the staggering, staining failure of The New York Times to depict Hitler's methodical extermination of the Jews of Europe as a horror beyond all other horrors in World War II -- a Nazi war within the war crying out for illumination.

I had the following exchange in November of 2001 with the Times' former Executive Editor. I wrote:

Dear Mr. Frankel:

I read your article "Turning Away from the Holocaust" with some interest, especially the statement:

"No single explanation seems to suffice for what was surely the century's bitterest journalistic failure."

If not giving enough publicity to the Holocaust was "the century's bitterest journalistic failure," then what do you call the long series of outright lies the New York Times published denying Stalin's even more deadly campaigns of mass murder in the Thirties? The Times still takes credit for this pro-Stalin fiction every time it prints the list of Times writers to have won the Pulitzer Prize. Right there at the top of the list is Walter Duranty - 1932. Isn't it time to renounce that Pulitzer and issue an apology to the millions of surviving relatives?

Steve Sailer

Frankel replied:

The Times has openly acknowledged that Duranty's coverage was seriously flawed and his picture among our Pulitzer winners at the office carries that notation. But the former publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, decided that there's no way to "return" a prize at this late date, that its mistaken award is simply part of history.

As to which failure was more bitter, I dare say many people would have still other nominations. I had in mind the failure at the Times, but what made it especially bitter was that The Times no doubt influenced coverage of the Holocaust throughout the rest of American journalism. That was not true in Duranty's time; many other papers and journals gave excellent accounts of events in Stalin's Russia.

Thanks for your interest.

max f.

In other words, because Duranty's lies were being shown up as lies in less influential newspapers, that makes it not so bad. And, anyway, Duranty's lies about the Ukrainian Holocaust are now all part of history's rich pageant, and who are we to rewrite history?

I replied to Frankel, with quotes from him in italics:

Let's try an analogy. Say a New York Times reporter had won the 1944 Pulitzer Prize for numerous NYT articles denying the existence of Hitler's campaign of mass murder. Would your response be the following?

"The Times has openly acknowledged that our reporter's coverage was seriously flawed and his picture among our Pulitzer winners at the office carries that notation. But the former publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, decided that there's no way to "return" a prize at this late date, that its mistaken award is simply part of history."

You write:

> As to which failure was more bitter, I dare say many people would have still other nominations.

Herbert Matthews' NYT coverage of Castro in 1958 leaps to mind, as does James Reston's NYT writings about Mao in 1972. The NYT seems to have had a recurring problem with being seduced by mass murdering totalitarians. Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement among morally serious people (i.e., people who believe that all victims of mass murder are created equal, rather than those who believe that some are more equal than others) that Duranty's performance stands out as the most egregious American journalistic performance of the last century.

> I had in mind the failure at the Times, but what made it especially bitter was that The Times no doubt influenced coverage of the Holocaust throughout the rest of American journalism. That was not true in Duranty's time; many other papers and journals gave excellent accounts of events in Stalin's Russia.

So, you are saying that the Times' editors were reading the truth in other publications about Stalin's genocidal campaign against Ukrainians and his other mass murders, yet chose to print Duranty's lies instead? And, therefore, that's a less bitter failure of journalism than its WWII performance of printing the truth about the Holocaust, but not giving it the banner headlines it deserved?

You also seem to be implying that the NYT's lies about Stalinism in the early Thirties were less influential than their muted truthtelling about the Holocaust while it was happening.

That makes no logical sense. If I was worried that mass murder might possibly be happening, I would be much more influenced by the New York Times telling me over and over again (in Stalin's case) NO, EVERYTHING IS HUNKY-DORY. THOSE RUMORS ARE JUST REACTIONARY PROPAGANDA than (in Hitler's case) telling me now and then on P. 17 that, yes, mass murder is happening, the rumors are true.

Further, I'm not aware of any historical evidence the NYT's mistakes were luckily less influential in Stalin's case than in Hitler's. Certainly, American government policy toward Stalin from 1933 through 1945 was based largely on wishful thinking. And American intellectual life during that period was severely diseased by Stalin-worship. The NYT deserves a definite share of the blame for this.

Will you be publishing a reconsideration of your judgment?

Steve Sailer

Strangely enough, Frankel didn't reply a second time.

*

Note: While I frequently print emails, I always strip off any identifying attributions. In this case, however, the contents were so unbelievable that after thinking about it for over three years, when I saw that Laurel Leff had published a book on Frankel's topic, I finally decided to break my own rule.

*

If Mr. Frankel wants to find out what his newspaper was up to during the Ukrainian Holocaust, he can read Sally J. Taylor's 1990 biography: Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times's Man in Moscow (now out of print, surprise, surprise).

One little known fact about Duranty was that before World War I he had been a leading Satanist, the right hand man of the world's top Satan-worshipper, Aleister Crowley. (I'm not making this up.)

*

Let's be frank: history is not written by the victors. The truth about who writes history isn't well understood, even though it's tautological:

History is written by the writers of history.

What that means, in practical terms, is that if the Ukrainians want their Holocaust to stop being ignored, well, they'll just have to become executive editors and professors of journalism and columnists and historians and movie producers and documentarians and all the rest. The Ukrainians will have to do it themselves. People care about avenging their relatives' victimizations a lot more than they care about fair historical balance.

*

Orwell wrote in "Notes on Nationalism" in October 1945:

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians. It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell’s soldiers slashing Irishwomen’s faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the ‘right’ cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities — in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna — believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.

For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Abortion-Crime Graphs Steven D. Levitt Won't Show You in Freakonomics:

I see that Levitt's book Freakonomics, which argues that legalizing abortion cut crime, is now the #2 bestseller on Amazon.com. I also note that Amazon first posted, then yanked, my reader review poking holes in his theory, presumably to avoid casting a pall upon the sellathon.

So, here are two graphs from my article in the May 9th issue of The American Conservative.

First, Levitt's theory is predicated -- at least publicly -- on abortion reducing the proportion of "unwanted" babies, who are presumed to be more likely to grow up to be criminals. The empirical problem with this is that legalization (which occurred in California, New York, and three other states in 1970 and nationally in 1973), didn't put the slightest dent in the illegitimacy rate, which is, by far, the most obvious objective sign of not being wanted by the mother and father, and has been linked repeatedly with crime:

You'll note that the growth in the illegitimacy rate didn't start to slow down until the mid-1990s when the abortion rate finally went down a considerable amount.

My article offers a simple explanation, drawn from Levitt's own research, of why legal abortion tends to increase illegitimacy.

Second, the acid test of Levitt's theory is that it predicts that the first cohort to survive being culled by legal abortion should have been particularly law-abiding. Instead, they went on the worst teen murder rampage in American history. Here's a graph showing the homicide rate for 14-17 year olds, and below each year is the average birthdate of the 14-17 year old cohort.

For example, the 14-17 year olds in the not particularly murderous year of 1976 were, on average, born about 1960 (i.e., 1976 - 16 years of age = 1960), so they didn't "benefit" from being culled by legalized abortion the way that the 14-17 years olds during the peak murder years of 1993 and 1994 should have benefited, according to Levitt.

In contrast, the homicide rate for the 25 and over cohort (none of whom enjoyed the benefits of legalized abortion) was lower in 1993 than in 1983.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How Bad Memes Remove Themselves from the Gene Pool

From a marriage announcement in the NYT:

Dr. Debbara Jean Dingman and Daniel John DeNoon were married last evening at the Commerce Club in Atlanta. The Rev. Grover E. Criswell, a Disciples of Christ minister, performed the nondenominational ceremony.

Dr. Dingman, 49, will keep her name. She is a clinical psychologist in private practice and also an adjunct assistant professor of psychology at Georgia State University and a faculty member at the Pine River Psychotherapy Training Institute, all in Atlanta.

The bride graduated from Florida State University and received both a master's degree and a doctorate in psychology from Georgia State University.

Mr. DeNoon, 53, is a senior writer in Atlanta for the news department of WebMD.com, a medical information Web site. He graduated from Emory University.

Dr. Dingman and Mr. DeNoon met at an Atlanta jazz club in 1978, where she was a hostess and he a bartender.

Dr. Dingman, in the spirit of feminism at that time, called herself Debbie "Dingperson," without cracking a smile, she said.

Their attraction to one another was immediate. As they got to know each other better, they found they also had other things in common - the love of "good food, travel, old hotels," and their political beliefs, Dr. Dingman recalled. But it was their different approaches to social activism and feminism that added conflict, or perhaps spice, to an already intense relationship.

"Everything had to be totally discussed and negotiated," Mr. DeNoon recalled. "What I considered courteous - pulling out her chair, opening a door - she would take as an insult."

Dr. Dingman added: "We had an ability to argue about everything. He would order wine, and I'd be upset that he did it without consulting me. And then we'd argue about the migrant workers who picked the grapes. There was a real push-pull to our relationship."

Still, after about a year, they - and their friends - recognized that they were indeed a couple. But Dr. Dingman and Mr. DeNoon were not interested in marrying. They wanted a relationship that was "more egalitarian," she said. "More feminist. More in line with what our gay and lesbian friends did." This arrangement, in effect, required that the two continually review their decision to stay together. "We would choose each other each day," Dr. Dingman said, adding, "it was inefficient but romantic."

Two years ago they began changing their minds about marriage, acknowledging that both they and society were evolving.

"Gloria Steinem was one of my heroes," Dr. Dingman said. "When she married several years ago, it was instructive to me that I should not reject the institution of marriage out of hand."

Mr. DeNoon said he became more interested in marrying when marriage became a legal option for same-sex couples. He and Dr. Dingman attended the commitment ceremony of lesbian friends, and were impressed with that couple's public celebration of their love.

"We realized that we can say in front of everybody we know that, yes, we do indeed love one another, and that's not going to change tomorrow morning," he said.

Fortunately, after 27 years of this, they are too old to reproduce and perpetuate their genes. May their memes be as infertile.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Harvard Law Review vs. Reality

Harvard Law Review vs. Reality: A reader writes:

This article, "Trojan Horses of Race" by Jerry Kang of UCLA, is in the new Harvard Law Review. (118 Harv. L. Rev. 1489 (2005)).

I thought you might be interested in is thesis, which is that (1) the FCC deregulated media ownership rules in order to increase the availability of local news; (2) local news shows a lot of stories about violent crime committed by racial minorities; (3) this causes whites to be _irrationally_ afraid of racial minorities; and (4) therefore, there is too much local news and the FCC should use a different standard in evaluating whether to relax ownership rules.

Extraordinary, no?

Rather than the federal government, in effect, censoring local television news to prevent Americans from understanding the truth about the crime problem, wouldn't a better win-win solution for all concerned be for blacks and Hispanics to stop committing more crimes than Asians and whites?

That reminds me of a major problem in Britain that complements the lack of federalism, and both together contribute to its terrible crime rate. The press is overwhelmingly concentrated in London and focuses on more glamorous national and international issues rather than on mundane local problems like crime. The Guardian, for example, used to be the Manchester Guardian, but that was a long time ago. Crime is left for the sensationalistic tabloids, and thus the whole issue is considered declasse. You can see the same bias at work with the Los Angeles Times, which has pretences to being a national newspapers, so it studiously ignores the crime problems caused by illegal immigration in Los Angeles. Fortunately, there are local newspapers like the LA Daily News that crusade for a better life for Los Angelenos, and local radio programs like the John and Ken Show.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Did Legalizing Abortion Cut Crime?

"Meet the economist who figured out that legal abortion was behind dropping crime rates" burbles Steven E. Landsburg on the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com site. Yes, it's more hype for Steven D. Levitt's new book Freakonomics. Landsburg writes:

Back in 1999, Mr. Levitt was trying to figure out why crime rates had fallen so dramatically in the previous decade. He was struck by the fact that crime began falling nationwide just 18 years after the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion. He was struck harder by the fact that in five states crime began falling three years earlier than it did everywhere else. These were exactly the five states that had legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade.

Did crime fall because hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted? Once again, the pattern by itself is not conclusive, but once again Mr. Levitt piles pattern on pattern until the evidence overwhelms you. The bottom line? Legalized abortion was the single biggest factor in bringing the crime wave of the 1980s to a screeching halt.

I first debated with Levitt over whether legalized abortion cut crime way back in Slate.com in 1999. My new article in the May 9, 2005 edition of The American Conservative (available to electronic subscribers this weekend) punches a big hole in Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory. Here's a brief excerpt:

"According to Levitt's logic, murder should have declined first among the youngest and last among the oldest. Did it?

"Unfortunately for Levitt, the opposite is true. The murder rate for Americans age 25 and over started falling way back in 1981 (when the youngest person in this cohort was born in 1956) and fell fairly steadily for two decades. Indeed, in contrast to his theory about post-Roe individuals being especially law-abiding, the adult murder rate has only begun to creep back up now that people born after Roe have begun to make up a noticeable fraction of those 25 and up. From 1999 through 2002 (the latest year available, when a 25 year old would have born four years after Roe), the murder rate among 25-34 year olds has risen 17 percent, while continuing to drop among the under 25s.

"But the acid test of Levitt's theory is this: Did the first New, Improved Generation culled by legalized abortion actually grow up to be more lawful teenagers than the last generation born before legalization?

"Hardly. Instead, the first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history.

"Abortion became legal in 1970 in California, New York, and three minor states, and was legalized in the other 45 states in 1973 by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. Let's compare the murder rate of 14-17 year olds in 1983 (who were born in the last pre-legalization years of 1965-1969) with that of 14-17 years olds a decade later in 1993 (who were born in the high-abortion years of 1975-1979).

"Was this post-Roe cohort better behaved than their pre-legalization elders? Not exactly. Their murder rate was 3.1 times worse.

"In contrast, 18-24 year olds in 1993 (some born before legalization, some after) committed 86 percent more murders than a decade earlier, while people 25 and up (all born before legalization) were 18 percent _less_ lethal.

Back in 1983, 14-17 year olds were barely more than half has likely as 25-34 years olds to kill. In 1993 and 1994, however, this purportedly better-bred generation of juveniles was more than twice as deadly as 25-34 year olds."

A lot of naive reviewers like Landsburg are going to make fools out of themselves because Levitt and Dubner failed to mention any of these massive problems with Levitt's theory in their book Freakonomics. To get the full story on how legalizing abortion might even have caused the murder rate to go up, get the May 9th edition of The American Conservative.

Graphs from upcoming article are now online at: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/04/abortion-crime-graphs-steven-d-levitt.html

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Theory of Beauty:

Armand Marie Leroi says on Edge.org:

What of human physical beauty? This is something that interests me greatly. I'm not interested in the general aesthetic question here, but ourselves. Some people say that beauty is uninteresting and that it's just a matter of taste. I don't think so. I would say, and there are others who would certainly agree with me, that we have a general psychological program from which stems a universal notion of beauty. Incidentally, this idea that we all perceive certain features to be beautiful is one that Darwin would have disagreed with. Darwin believed that the perception of beauty was particular to particular peoples in particular times and places. He was probably wrong, or at least he was only partly right. I won't attempt to justify that answer, but I think it to be true. These days, the general thinking tends to be that there's a universal notion of beauty which is true for people around the world. And the question is, what is that and what drives it?

Certainly, there are different fashions in different eras, but I suspect the same people would have often tended to wind up on top of the beauty pyramid. If, say, the Madonna of 1991 had been around back in Marilyn Monroe's 1955, Madonna would simply have had the more relaxed body shape fashionable in 1955. I don't know for sure that Marilyn could have achieved Madonna's taut 1991 look, but I suspect she would have come close.

Many people think that beauty is a certificate of health; this is an idea that comes out of sociobiology. But it is more obvious than than that. It's simply the idea that beautiful people are healthy people and we search for healthy mates. And that's probably true. Or at least it was. But is it still? In the past, health was primarily a matter of environmental conditions—your exposure to contagious diseases and the amount of food that you had when you were growing up. Rich people had better environments, hence the positive association between beauty and wealth. But what of modern economically egalitarian societies such as Holland? In such societies, does the ancient association still obtain? If the variance in beauty is due to the variance in the quality of the rearing environment then it must be the case that the Dutch — who all eat much the same good food, live in much the same well-designed houses, and have access to much the same excellent health-care — must all be equivalently beautiful. But is this so? The answer is, of course, no. Among the Dutch you can find good-looking and not so good-looking people. And the question is then, why?

I would argue that the reason for this is that there is and will always be variance in beauty is because there is variance in mutational load. What is beauty fundamentally about? I would argue — and this is really just a postulate at this time, but it is one that interests me a great deal — that the fundamental reason why some of us are more beautiful than others is because of those deleterious mutations that we all carry We may carry 300 deleterious mutations on average, but there is of course a variance associated with that. Not everybody has 300. Some people have more, some people have fewer. If this is true—and statistically it must be true — then someone in the world has the fewest mutations of all. Someone in the world is the least mutant human of all. Indeed, we can actually calculate, making some assumptions about the shape of the distribution, how many mutations that person has — and it turns out to be 191 versus the average of 300. This, to my mind, is surprisingly many. I would suggest that if we could find that person, he or she would be a good candidate for being the most beautiful person in the world. At least she would be, assuming she did not grow up in some impoverished underdeveloped nation. Which, statistically, she will have done since most people do.

If we could use genetic engineering to get rid of all those deleterious mutations -- what Greg Cochran calls "genetic proofreading" -- then we could make people healthier without the risks inherent in trying to change adequate genes to better ones.

Still, I'm not convinced that this all there is to beauty, or at least to feminine beauty which I pay more attention to than masculine beauty.

Exhibit A is a British actress named Tilda Swinton, who recently played the Archangel Gabriel in Keanu Reeves' "Constantine" and is best known as Orlando in the movie version of Virginia Woolf's fable about an immortal, sex-shifting nobleman/woman.

There's no question that Swinton, even in her mid-40s, is beautiful in the objective sense that Leroi is using, but the reason she's not a big star is because her beauty is more androgynous than feminine, which is why she gets roles as angels rather than as romantic leading ladies. She looks a lot like Cate Blanchett (who won the Oscar playing Kate Hepburn), but Swinton makes Blanchett look like Sophia Loren in the ripe womanhood department.

So, female beauty seems to be composed of two parts: A. As Leroi notes, lack of deleterious mutations, lack of infections, and lack of other bad things, and B. Femaleness, and the more the better.

But femaleness as part of beauty leads to questions like: If 36-24-36 is good, why wouldn't 40-20-40 be better? Judging from cartoon characters, the males of the world would be all for 40-20-40 women, in theory, but in practice, they would probably tend to fall over a lot, develop back problems, and have lots of other health and safety difficulties. In other words, while sexual selection pushes for 40-20-40, natural selection, such as getting eaten by sabre-tooth tigers because less voluptuous girls from your tribe can outrun you, pushes against it.

Similarly, in "Constantine," a semi-androgynous demon named Balthazar is played Gavin Rossdale, singer for the band Bush, who has the classic high-cheekbones of a rock star. Johnny Depp, who moved to Hollywood to become a singer, has a classic rock star's face with his high cheekbones and delicate jaw. (In the sequel to "Pirates of the Caribbean," his father will be played by Rolling Stone Keith Richards). Depp is beautiful in Leroi's sense, but when he's supposed to play a regular guy, like in "Donnie Brasco," he's kind of funny looking because he's not very masculine.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Friends of Frum

Perhaps no speechwriter in American history has done more damage to America's diplomatic standing in the world with a single phrase than David Frum did by composing two-thirds of the catastrophic phrase "axis of evil" in the early 2002 State of the Union address. To be precise, Frum came up with "axis of hatred," which was later revised to "axis of evil," but the use of the self-evidently dishonest term "axis" to describe two nations that hated each other -- Iran and Iraq -- and a third -- North Korea -- that had almost nothing to do with the others was the key moment at which the world's post-911 sympathy for America turned to contempt and fear of the designs of the Bush Administration. The use of the word "axis" declared that the U.S. government no longer showed enough of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" (as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence) to avoid lying brazenly.

Having done so much damage to America, Frum then turned his talents upon conservatives, with his notorious National Review article "Unpatriotic Conservatives." But let's discuss Frum's current friends, such as Christopher Hitchens. As Tom Piatak notes, Hitch has been in a frenzy of late slandering John Paul II. Further, Hitch published a hagiography of Leon Trotsky as a "prophetic moralist" just last summer in the Atlantic Monthly.

And, of course, Frum is shocked, SHOCKED at Reagan Administration official Vince Cannistraro hinting that Michael Ledeen was "very close" to the forger(s) of the Niger Yellowcake documents. From what little I know of the case, Ledeen probably wasn't involved, but, from what's on the public record about the International Man of Mystery's past, he'd obviously be the most likely single person to know useful information about who snookered America. If this country was serious about getting to the bottom of who forged the documents that helped get us into the war, Ledeen would be the first person we'd take down to Guantanamo to see if he could aid us in our inquiries. But, of course, the Bush Administration has very little interest in the truth emerging. And Ledeen has shown no more enthusiasm for searching for the real forgers than O.J. has in searching for the real killers.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Black Baby Names:

Economist Steven D. Levitt writes in Slate in an excerpt from his upcoming book Freakonomics:

The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name—whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn—does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake. But it isn't the fault of his or her name. If two black boys, Jake Williams and DeShawn Williams, are born in the same neighborhood and into the same familial and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes. But the kind of parents who name their son Jake don't tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. And that's why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn. DeShawn's name is an indicator—but not a cause—of his life path.

Still, while it's unlikely names have a big effect, Levitt apparently didn't look at siblings, like economist David Figlio did recently. In contrast, Figlio found an adverse effect to naming your kid Jamal instead of James.

As Levitt writes:

What kind of parent is most likely to give a child such a distinctively black name? The data offer a clear answer: an unmarried, low-income, undereducated, teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself. Giving a child a super-black name would seem to be a black parent's signal of solidarity with her community—the flip side of the "acting white" phenomenon. White parents, meanwhile, often send as strong a signal in the opposite direction. More than 40 percent of the white babies are given names that are at least four times more common among whites.

So, it's not impossible that naming your kid Jamal sends him a message that you want him to "act black" while naming his brother James sends him a message you want him to "act white."

By the way, my article on the most hyped element within Levitt's Freakonomics, his theory that legalizing abortion cut crime, will be out to electronic subscribers to The American Conservative this weekend.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Me and the Next Pope:

A reader asks:

Do you really not have an opinion on who the next Pope will be? Even given there are a whole bunch of Latin Americans seriously in the running?

No, at this point I'm clueless. It's been my entire adult life since the last Papal election, so I don't have any database to draw from. The entire electorate is new since the last election too. John Tierney, in his first NYT op-ed column, however, suggests a source for objective forecasts: the Irish gambling futures market on the Papal election.

Keep in mind, however, that a Papal Bull of 1591 outlawed betting on papal elections, which had been getting out of hand during the 16th Century. (Those darn Protestants took most of the fun out of Catholicism with their killjoy Reformation. But, not all of it -- gambling at parish functions is still a big deal. When one of my sons was nine, he won $1,000 at a parish raffle. It was the fourth straight time he won something at a church event, so I would rely on his instincts more than mine if you are in a gambling mood.)

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn writes:

We live in a present-tense culture where novelty is its own virtue: the Guardian, for example, has already been touting the Nigerian Francis Arinze as "candidate for first black pope". This would be news to Pope St Victor, an African and pontiff from 189 to 199. Among his legacies: the celebration of Easter on a Sunday.

But does being from Africa mean Pope St. Victor was black? How does Steyn know a Pope who died 1800 years ago was black? That's the same logic Afrocentrists use to proclaim Cleopatra black and argue that Denzel Washington should play Hannibal of Carthage instead of Vin Diesel (granted, the Afrocentrists have acting talent on their side on that one).

I briefly reviewed what's on the web about Pope St. Victor and the other two early popes from North Africa, but nothing seemed close to conclusive about what races they were. It's generally believed that St. Augustine, the famous North African theologian, was not black. To the best of my knowledge, the one major classical figure for whom we have positive evidence that he was notably black was Terence, the comic playwright of the Roman Republic. (And that evidence is actually sketchy.)

Terence is best known today for just one line, but it's a good one: "I am a man: I hold that nothing human is alien to me."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Will Michael Ledeen Search for the Real Forgers?

I doubt that Ledeen was involved in the forgery of the Niger Yellowcake documents which surfaced in Italy, but, judging from his long involvement with the Italian spy agency and all the other blotches on his checkered past (Iran-Contra, his being denied tenure due to ethics problems, and his run-ins with his Reagan Administration superiors over exactly whose side was he on: America's or Israel's), it would be ridiculous not to put him on the list of possible forgers. Like O.J., Ledeen could clear his name by using his extensive contacts within shadowy circles in Italy to find the real forgers. Or, is he perfectly happy with the U.S. government being misled into the Iraq War by forgeries? What do you think?

Here's an excerpt from Stephen Green's informative article "Serving Two Flags:"

What is so striking about the Ledeen-related documents which are part of the Iran-Contra Collection of the National Security Archive, is how thoroughly the judgments of Ledeen's colleagues at NSC mirrored, and validated, Noel Koch's [Ledeen's former Reagan Administration boss] internal security concerns about his consultant.

- on April 9, 1985, NSC Middle East analyst Donald Fortier wrote to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane that NSC staffers were agreed that Ledeen's role in the scheme should be limited to carrying messages to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres regarding plans to cooperate with Israel on the crisis within Iran, and specifically that he should not be entrusted to ask Peres for detailed operational information;

- on June 6, 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to McFarlane that, "Israel's record of dealings with Iran since the fall of the Shah and during the hostage crisis [show] that Israel's agenda is not the same as ours. Consequently doubt whether an intelligence relationship such as what Ledeen has in mind would be one which we could fully rely upon and it could seriously skew our own perception and analysis of the Iranian scene."

- on 20 August, 1985, the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense informed Ledeen by memorandum that his security clearance had been downgraded from Top Secret-SCI to Secret.

- on 16 January, 1986, Oliver North recommended to John Poindexter "for [the] security of the Iran initiative" that Ledeen be asked to take periodic polygraph examinations.

- later in January, on the 24th, North wrote to Poindexter of his suspicion that Ledeen, along with Adolph Schwimmer and Manucher Ghorbanifar, might be making money personally on the sale of arms to Iran, through Israel.

During the June 23-25, 1987 joint hearings of the House and Senate select committees' investigation of Iran-Contra, Noel Koch testified that he became suspicious when he learned that the price which Ledeen had negotiated for the sale to the Israeli Government of basic TOW missiles was $2,500 each.

Upon inquiring with his DOD colleagues, he learned the lowest price the U.S. had ever received for the sale of TOWs to a foreign government had been a previous sale to Israel for $6,800 per copy. Koch, professing in his testimony that he and his colleagues at DOD were not in favor of the sale to begin with, determined that he--Koch--should renegotiate the $2,500 price so that it could be defended by the "defense management system." In a clandestine meeting on a Sunday in the first class lounge of the TWA section of National Airport, Koch met over a cup of coffee with an official from the Israeli purchasing mission in New York, and agreed on a price of $4,500 per missile, nearly twice what Ledeen had "negotiated" in Israel.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

History of Golf Course Architecture

Tiger Woods wins The Masters: I wrote about the Augusta National Golf Club, the verdant venue for The Masters, in my 3,000 word article on golf course architecture as an art in the April 11th issue of The American Conservative (not online, but available on newsstands - or subscribe here). Here's an excerpt about the evolution of golf architecture styles, in which Augusta National played a key role:

In 1901, Willie Park Jr. unshackled golf from the linksland by forging the first excellent inland courses, Huntercombe and Sunningdale, outside of London. This opened the Golden Age of golf architecture (1901-1932).

The vast concentrations of wealth that existed before income and estate taxes could do their leveling work made possible daring, idiosyncratic designs. At the first great American golf course, Charles Blair MacDonald's National Golf Links of America in the Hamptons, robber-baron industrialists would dock their steam yachts next to his mind-bendingly intricate course, featuring holes modeled on the best of St. Andrews and other British links.

These decades combined flamboyant creativity with an appreciation of the sturdy principles behind the old Scottish courses, including a taste for quirkiness, irregularity, "fidelity to place," and random rubs of the green. This innovative era coincided with the similarly fertile period in American architecture that stretched from Louis Sullivan through Frank Lloyd Wright and the Arts and Crafts Movement to the Art Deco of the Chrysler Building. It was a period of legendary golf architects such as A.W. Tillinghast, William Flynn, and Donald Ross. There were also gifted amateurs such as Philadelphia hotel-owner George Crump, who lived for years in a wilderness cabin as his crews carved from the forest his stupendous Pine Valley, now usually rated the best course in the world.

A recurrent pattern in art history is that a style becomes progressively more complicated over time until a new, simpler manner sweeps the old clutter away, such as the pompous 1970s progressive rock of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer getting undermined by the three chord punk rock of The Ramones and the Sex Pistols, or over-decorated Victorian furniture giving way to Mies van der Rohe’s unadorned steel and leather Barcelona chair.

The transition golf course between the originality of the Golden Age and the rationality of the Modern Age was Augusta National, which opened in 1932. As the perpetual home of the Masters Tournament, the only major championship played on the same course each year, Augusta became the most influential course of the middle of the 20th century. Originally, a showcase for Alister MacKenzie's fertile Golden Age imagination, with boomerang-shaped greens and vast, sprawling bunkers, after the master's death in 1934, Augusta was slowly streamlined into the archetypal Modernist course with roundish greens and sand traps, threatening water hazards, and perfect greenskeeping. The most notable remodeler was Robert Trent Jones, who redesigned the 11th and 16th holes with his trademark lakes coming right up to the edge of the greens. Today, only one of MacKenzie's bunkers is left, the spectacular but curiously placed 70-yard long sand trap in the middle of the 10th fairway.

Following the long hiatus in course building caused by the Depression and World War II, Trent Jones rationalized and internationalized course design during the Modern Era (1948-1980). His approach was curiously similar to that of the Bauhaus architects, such as van der Rohe, who believed the phrase "form follows function" offered the only moral philosophy of design.

Prosperity was broad, but with income tax rates as high as 93 percent, wealth was too widely dispersed and bureaucratically managed to permit many rich men's follies like Pine Valley. Trent Jones' golf courses were big, sleek, straightforward, and efficient, just like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Lever House and the other flat-roofed steel and glass skyscrapers that sprouted across America during the age of the Organization Man.

Unfortunately, like the modernist office buildings, Jones' courses got a little … boring. Much of the appeal of golf courses is that they epitomize a particular landscape, offering focus and continuity of form to guide the eye and help you notice the local differences. Yet by building the same style everywhere, the Modern look made courses repetitious. Jones would put one set of bunkers alongside the fairway about 250 yards off the tee to capture wayward drives, and another set around the green to menace approach shots. A perfectly logical formula, but formula is the enemy of charm. In contrast, Golden Age architects distributed their traps more unpredictably to pester different classes of golfers.

A more subtle problem was that the hallmarks of modernist art—abstraction and reductionism—may not work well in golf course architecture. While a stroke of genius in sculpture is often to eliminate the unnecessary, complexity is currently seen as a general virtue in golf course architecture. The amount of value an architect adds to a site is often a simple equation of talent multiplied by time spent studying the land. MacDonald fiddled with The National for decades, and Donald Ross spent the Depression refining Pinehurst #2, where the U.S. Open will be held this June...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Decline of the English Working Class

Why has the white working class in America not decayed morally as fast as the English working class? My new VDARE column is online here. An excerpt:

Remember the tale of how to boil a frog? Just keep raising the temperature imperceptibly so the frog never notices it's being boiled alive. (Don't try this at home, kids.) Something similar happened in England, where society fell apart so slowly that elite opinion had time to get used to each new outrage.

In contrast, the U.S. murder rate doubled in just ten years—from 1964 to 1974. African-Americans served not as the frog in the pot but as the canary in the coalmine.

The welfare state took decades after its introduction in 1945 to corrupt the English. But the American liberal innovations of the 1960s, such as generous welfare for single mothers and shorter prison sentences, had such an immediately catastrophic effect on black morals that within a decade and a half, "liberal" had permanently become a term of abuse in American politics.

Way back in 1968, Richard Nixon ran on a law and order platform, somewhat like Michael Howard's in 2005. Granted, Nixon didn't do much about crime, but eventually the outraged public got its way. The quadrupling over the last third of a century of the prison population helped bring about the fall in crime in the later 1990s. The welfare reform of 1996 also has had a good effect on morals.

Class vs. Race. The central divide in Britain is class—in America, it's race. And that has had a little understood salutary effect on white working class Americans.

In England, the sons of maharajas were often more welcome at Eton and Oxford than the sons of fishmongers. Similarly, in the last couple of decades, blacks have been more welcomed into the working class in Britain than in America—because British working class identity centers on not acting like a toff. The entrance requirements to the working class are amiably relaxed—no need for "the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" elocution lessons. If you like 'aving a pint with your mates at the pub while watching Arsenal on the telly, well, you're halfway home.

Likewise, English youth see the gangsta rap lifestyle as a bit of a lark (as brilliantly parodied by Sacha Baron Cohen's brainless wigger Ali G). In contrast, white working class Americans view it, based on the abundant evidence provided by American blacks, as a one-way ticket to prison and the grave.

America upper middle class white liberals constantly sneer at working class whites as racists. And, indeed, most respectable working class whites do work hard to prevent their children from absorbing black underclass values. Affluent liberals are so well insulated from poor blacks that they don't have to worry that their college-bound kids will take gangsta rap's ethos seriously. But poorer whites don't have that luxury.

These anti-black feelings among the white working class have helped keep their young from turning to crime.

For example, Chicago was the white crime capital of the world 75 years ago during Al Capone's day—before the Great Migration of blacks to Chicago from the Mississippi Delta. Unlike most Northern cities, Chicago has hung on to a sizable white working class.

But the descendents of the minor mobsters of Al Capone's era today disdain crime, viewing it as a "black thing," because, although blacks and whites are about equal in number in Chicago, blacks are almost an order of magnitude more common behind bars in the Windy City. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Gary Brecher on the Fulda Gap

The War Nerd on WWIII:

If you're anything like me, you probably spent a lot of the 80s imagining what would happen if the big NATO-Warsaw Pact war in Central Europe came along. It's still hard for me to believe sometimes that the whole showdown just faded away without a shot fired.

Back in Reagan's day, everybody was dreaming about High Noon at the Fulda Gap, and reading what-if novels like The Third World War, by a British general, John Hackett, or Clancy's Red Storm Rising...

After the Soviets went out of business, I thought we'd get some really solid info on what the Warsaw Pact forces had planned, especially what their nuke and irregular forces (SpetzNaz teams) had in mind in the way of first strike and sabotage. Probably "we" did, meaning the intel community. But whatever they got, they didn't pass along much of it to us civilians out there.

Nor has there been much interest in the press, where the Cold War has largely disappeared down the media hole, while we get inundated with Nazi-era stuff constantly.

A reader adds:

You can say that again (and again). When Clancy's novel Hunt for Red October came out in 1990, Time magazine headlined it with this: "The Last Cold War Movie?" I'm still waiting for the headline, "The Last Nazi Heavy Movie?" If I didn't know better, I'd think there was something political to all of that, but of course I know better.

Back to Gary Brecher:

Well, a reader named Dima Sverin just sent me a (translated) interview with ex-Soviet general Matvey Burlakov, the last commander of the Soviet Southern and Western Forces, HQ'd in Hungary. Burlakov was a "Colonel-General," a very, very high rank, and in this interview with a Russian newspaper he pretty much spills all, as far as I can tell...

The first thing you notice about Burlakov's interview is how much the Soviets relied on tanks. When he talks about the war, the way it could've happened, he talks tanks: "The height of the Cold War was the early 1980s. All they [the Soviet leaders] had to do was give the signal and everything would have gone off. Everything was battle-ready. The shells were in the tanks. They just had to be loaded and fired."...

But I'm inclined to believe the old general when he says the Soviet tank armies would've kicked ass. The NATO forces were in a hopeless deployment: jammed into West Germany, an indefensible strip of heavily-populated territory. No strategic depth available, meaning the advantage was with whoever struck first. Once the population realized the Russians were coming, every Beemer and Merc in Germany would have hit the roads, those same roads our tanks were supposed to use. In that chaos, the Bundeswehr would have dissolved into a bunch of terrified locals looking for their families.

Burlakov is not too respectful, to put it mildly, about the West German military: "We had a sea of tanks on the [Soviet] Western Group. Three tank armies! And what did the [West] Germans have? The [German] workweek ends Friday and then you wouldn't find anyone, not a minister or a soldier. Just guards. By the time they realized what was happening, we would have burned up their tanks and looted their armories."

There you see it again, that obsession with tanks. The conventional wisdom right now is that the MBT's day is ending, but luckily we never saw what would happen if those three tank armies had poured through the Fulda Gap on some fine Sunday morning. (You definitely get the feeling that the plan involved attacking on a weekend, don't you?) With Soviet soldiers at the controls, and Soviet air support limiting USAF missions, a T-72 would have been a totally different machine from the Arab-crewed junkers littering the Middle East.

Of course it all depended on striking first. So would the Soviet Army have sucker-punched us? Burlakov says, "Of course! What else? Wait for them to strike us?"

The journalist asks again, like just to make sure: "We [the Soviets] would have struck first?" and the General says again, "Of course!"

And he makes it real clear that he's not just talking about conventional first strikes. The interviewer says, "But [Soviet] Foreign Minister Gromyko said that the USSR would not use nuclear weapons first!"

I love Burlakov's answer: "He said one thing and we [the Soviet staff] thought another. We are the ones responsible for wars." [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Larry Summers Feels His Own Pain:

The highlight of the Harvard President's latest craven speech denouncing himself for insensitivity had to be this personal anecdote:

Summers added that professors need to be aware of the great influence that positive or negative signals can have on their students. He said he had been drawn to economics but also was dissuaded from some other fields ''by experiences where I lagged slightly and where I was made to feel inadequate."

He described an occasion when he gave the wrong answer to a physics question and ''the person who saw my answer looked on with a certain stunned belief that I could be so stupid."

For some reason, I'm reminded of the scene in Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic where the Black Panther spokesman at conductor Leonard Bernstein's infamous fundraising party for the Black Panthers says:

"Like the other day I was coming out of the courthouse in Queens and there was this off-duty pig going by ... see ... and he gives me the finger ... and for some reason or other, this kind of got the old anger boiling... you know?"

"God," says Lenny [Bernstein], and he swings his head around toward the rest of the room [which is full of Manhattan's social and media elite, such as Barbara Walters, Julia Belafonte, and Otto Preminger] "most of the people in this room have had a problem with being unwanted!"

Self-pity is the hallmark of leftism, and Larry is finally getting in the Lenny spirit. If only that physicist hadn't looked at Larry funny when he gave the wrong answer, then Larry's fragile spirit wouldn't have been crushed and he wouldn't have had to become Harvard's youngest tenured economics professor and Secretary of the Treasury. That's the spirit!

A professor writes me:

What I find ironic about this concern with sending signals that turn students away from certain disciplines is that in all my years as a student, the only time I was made to feel inadequate was when I expressed an interest in becoming a sociologist specializing in race. It was made very clear to me that, as a white male, not only was I not welcome in that field, but I was congenitally too stupid to understand the profound mysteries of Blackness, or Femaleness for that matter if I might turn my interest to Women's Studies. The "Need Not Apply" sign wasn't just posted, it was shoved in my face.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer