Table of Contents
Introduction xv
Section 1 The Path to the Present 1
From Runnymede to Stelle's Hotel 3
A Nation Not Made by Flimsy People 5
News Bulletin: The American Revolutionary War Was Violent 8
U. S. Grant, and the Writing of History, Rescued 10
Frederick Douglass, A Classical Liberal Born at Sixteen 12
An Illinois Pogrom 15
Let Us Now Praise President Taft 17
America's Dark Home Front during World War I 20
The Somme: The Hinge of World War I, and Hence of Modern History 22
Prohibition's Unintended Consequences 24
When America Reached Peak Stupidity 27
"Tell That to Mrs. Coolidge" 29
1940: When the Republican Establishment Mattered 32
America's Last Mass Lynching 34
A Year in U.S. History as Disruptive as 2020 36
The Perverse Fecundity of a Perfect Failure 39
The Transformation of a Murder, and of Liberalism 41
JFK: Not So Elusive 44
Vietnam: Squandered Valor 46
Not an Illness, a Vaccine 48
Haunted by Hue 51
Apollo 11: A Cap Tossed over the Wall 53
The Thunderclap of Ocean Venture '81 55
"This Is Going to Be Difficult" 58
Home to Henry Wright's Farm 60
Looking Backward through Rose-Tinted Glasses 62
Section 2 Politics and Policies 65
Crises and the Collectivist Temptation 67
The Announcement of a Presidential Candidacy You Will Never Hear 69
The Awful State of the State of the Union Address 71
How Not to Select Presidential Candidates 74
Socialism: A Classification That No Longer Classifies 76
American Socialists: Half Right 79
Anti-Capitalist Conservatives versus Progressives: The Narcissism of Small Differences 81
Better Never Means Better for Everyone 84
The Extravagant Faith of Market Skeptics 86
Nikki Haley against "Hyphenated Capitalism" 89
Data Confounds the Cassandra Caucus 91
Worse Can Be Better 94
Lear Raging on His Twitter-Heath 96
"Baumol's Disease" Is the Public Sector's Health 99
Defining Efficiency Down 101
America, Dated by "Rule Stupor" 104
Larry Summers's Epiphany 106
The National Endowment for the Arts' Adaptive Evolution 108
Ignorance of the Law Is… Inevitable 111
The Catholic Crime Wave 113
Bootleggers and Baptists, Together Yet Again 115
Overcriminalization Killed Eric Garner 118
Drug Policy and the "Balloon Effect" 120
Rethinking the Drug Control Triad 123
Injustices in the Criminal Justice System 125
Coercive Plea Bargaining Is a National Embarrassment 127
How the Right to a Trial Is Nullified 130
Disenfranchising Felons: Why? 132
Human Reclamation through Bricklaying 134
Sing Sing: "Not a Landfill but a Recycling Center" 137
Section 3 Justice. More or Less. Sometimes. 141
Aristotle and the Bikini-Clad Baristas 143
The Recurring Evil of the "One Drop" Rule 145
"Judicial Engagement" against the Administrative State 148
Legal Logic versus Judicial Labels 150
Public Sector Unions: FDR Was Right 153
The Court's Correct Correction 155
Social Sciences, Brain Science, and the Eighth Amendment 158
"Depravity" and the Eighth Amendment 160
When Vernon Madison Was Not "Competent to Be Executed" 163
Will It Be 1972 Forever? The High Court's Misplaced Modesty 165
Philadelphia's "Room 101" 167
"What Country Are We In?" 170
Do Fish Perform Pedicures? 172
"Shut Up!": North Carolina Explained 175
A Cake and "Animus" in Colorado 177
A Victory (Only) for the Baker 180
Supreme Court to the Prickly Plaintiffs of Greece, New York: Lighten Up 182
Cranky Secularists Have Their Cross to Bear 184
Resuscitating the Rights of National Citizenship 187
Korematsu v. United States, Repudiated 189
The Court and the Politics of Politics 192
Litigating through a Fog of Euphemisms 194
Section 4 Excursions into Science 197
Mapping the Universe Between Our Ears 199
Medicalizing Character Flaws 201
A Telescope as History Teacher 204
"Take a Sun and Put It in a Box" 206
The Pathology of Climatology 208
The MWP, LIA, and the Climate Change Debate 210
A Note on Violins and Climate Change 213
You Are Not a Teetering Contraption 214
The Coronavirus's Disturbing Lesson 216
Section 5 Thinking Economically 219
A Pessimist's Fatal Conceit 221
"Creative Destruction": More the Former than the Latter 223
The Accelerated Churning 226
The Great Enrichment, the Great Flinch, and the Complacent Class 228
Pope Francis's Fact-Free Sanctimony 230
Peak Nonsense about Scarcities 233
The Not at All Dismal Science 235
"Where Is the Pencil Czar?" 238
Section 6 Skirmishes in the Culture War 241
The Ideological Ax-Grinding of the 1619 Project 243
"Is Food the New Sex?" 245
About That Snake in the Center Seat… 248
Sanitizing Names Is Steady Work 250
Ban "Oklahoma"? 252
A Raised Eyebrow about "Redskins" 255
Slants, Redskins, and Other Insensitivities 257
What Is the Matter with Oregon? 259
Progressivism at Oregon's Gas Pumps 262
Oregon Engineers Another Embarrassment 264
The 1960s Echo: The Politics of Reciprocal Resentment 266
The "Hometown-Gym-on-a-Friday-Night" Feeling 269
An Endangered Species: The American Adult 271
The Plight of Princeton Women 274
Anti-Elitism and the "Meteorologist Fallacy" 276
The Problem with "Parental Determinism" 278
Free-Range Parenting 281
The Damage Done by Too Much Parental Praise 283
"Advantage Hoarding" in Cognitively Stratified America 285
Awesome Children and Difficult Food Choices in Gentrified Brooklyn 288
Section 7 Peculiar Goings-on in the Groves of Academe 291
36,000 Valedictorians: "They Can't All Go to Brown." 293
The First Amendment Amended: 'Freedom from Speech 296
The First Amendment in the "Free Speech Gazebo" 298
The "Surveillance State" in Ann Arbor 301
Salutary Ludicrousness 303
The Campus "Rape Culture" and the Death of Due Process 306
All Right Then, What an Unreasonable Person Finds Offensive 308
The College Degree as Status Marker 311
Yale and Other Incubators 313
Another Yale Burlesque, "Contextualized" 316
Diversity: In Everything but Thought 318
Mandatory Political Participation in California 321
"Sustainability" as Theology 323
The Consequences of Academia's Kudzu-like Bureaucracies 326
The High Cost of Oberlin's "Core Values" 328
Academic Supply Meets Diminishing Demand 331
Taxing Independent Excellence 333
Harvard's Problem Is Americas, Too 335
About Harvard: Three Hard Questions 338
The SAT and the Privilege, If Such It Is, of Transmitted Advantages 340
Meritocracy and the SAT's "Adversity Index" 343
The Surplus of Intellectual Emptiness 345
A Hymn to Impracticability 347
Section 8 Matters of Life and Death 351
Brittany Maynard: Death on Her Terms 353
Abortion: Who Are the Extremists? 355
The Wholesome Provocations of "Heartbeat Bills" 358
"America's Biggest Serial Killer" 360
"Inappropriate" 362
Iceland's Final Solution to the Down Syndrome "Problem" 365
Jon Will at Forty 367
Section 9 Darkness Remembered 371
German Resistance: Neither Negligible nor Contemptible 373
Eichmann: Not "Terrifyingly Normal" 375
The 442nd 378
"Into Eternity, Vilma" 380
"It Happened. Therefore It Can Happen Again." 382
The Politics of Memory 385
"Falling Soldier": A Well-Intended Falsification 387
China: Churchill's Foreboding, Redux 390
Faint Echoes of Fascism 392
Authoritarianism and the Politics of Emotion 395
Section 10 Complaints and Appreciations 399
The Plague of Denim 401
Drowning in a River of Public Words 403
Hobbes at Whole Foods 405
A Car under a Cloud of Smug 408
Frank Sinatra's Reminder 410
Appropriation Indignation: Elvis, How Could You! 412
Bob Dylan's Two Propositions 415
The Beach Boys and the Boomers' Music-Cued Nostalgia 417
Downton Abbey and Nostalgia Gluttony 419
Truth Decay and Healthy Distrust 422
In Praise of Binge Reading 424
Section 11 Games 427
Are You Ready for Some Autopsies? 429
The Morality of Enjoying Football 431
Super Bowl Sunday: A Roman Holiday 433
Rally 'Round the Math Class! 436
College Football and the Question of Cookie Corruption 438
The Wages of Amateurism 440
March Madness After All 443
Cooperstown: Museum or Shrine? 445
Baseball's Common Law 448
Autumn for Some Boys of Long Ago Summers 450
Vin Scully, Craftsman 452
Section 12 Farewells, Mostly Fond 455
"The Smartest Man in the United States" 457
The Roman Candle Jurist 459
William F. Buckley's High-Spirited Romp 461
The Twentieth Century's Most Consequential Journalist 464
Charles Krauthammer: "First, You Go to Medical School" 466
The Catcher at Dago Hill 469
Fidel Castro and Utopianism, Both Dead 471
Billy Graham: Neither Prophet nor Theologian 473
George McGovern: He Came by the Horror of War Honorably 476
Gerald Ford: The Benevolent Accident 478
George H. W. Bush: "I Am Not a Mystic" 481
"Then Along Came Nancy" 483
"The Eyes of Caligula and the Lips of Marilyn Monroe" 485
The Last Doughboy 488
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Walton 490
Acknowledgments 493
Index 494