SATURDAY OCTOBER 5, 2019
Editor's Note
This week we pay tribute to the great anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon. If you aren't already familiar with Chagnon's story--and the injustice visited upon him by activist-journalists and anthropologists--make sure you read Matthew Blackwell's expansive obituary linked below. Our tribute to Chagnon outlines his pioneering ethnographic work with the Yanomamö, as well as the vicious (and fraudulent) witch-hunt waged against him, and then his later sadness about the capture of his discipline by activists and postmodernism.
While you're here, make sure you also check Coleman Hughes' data rich analysis of the progress young black Americans have made over the last two decades, as well as Ryan Holiday's amusing expose of the ridiculous practice of hiring "sensitivity readers" to vet manuscripts for offensiveness. And lastly, don't miss Toby Young's conversation with Douglas Murray about his new book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity .

--Claire Lehmann

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By Matthew Blackwell
Matthew Blackwell pays tribute to the great anthropologist.


By Coleman Hughes
Over the last two decades, black Americans have made massive strides on almost every metric worth caring about--so why isn't this progress more well known?
Samantha Geimer talks to Jonathan Kay about why she has refused to be cast as a victim and how she’s dealt with the controversy her stance has generated. She is steeling herself for another bout of unwanted attention when Polanski’s new film— An Officer and a Spy —is released next month.

By Kevin Mims
Kevin Mims looks back on the dishonest defenestration campaigns which targeted prize fighter Jack Dempsey and silent film actor, "Fatty" Arbuckle, in the 1920s, and the toll they took on the men involved.


A new book takes a look at the particular personality-type that drives totalitarian regimes.


By Phyllis Chesler
Does The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments more accurately reflect women's lives in the United States or Afghanistan?


By Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday employed a "sensitivity reader" to scan his latest book. Here he retells what he found out about their work.


By Jamie Kilstein
The firing of a comedian from Saturday Night Live shows that we don't actually root for redemption anymore--we just want to see them punished, argues Jamie Kilstein.


By Stephen Elliott
In a story about compassion and forgiveness, Stephen Elliott reflects on his years living on the streets, recalling an episode where he was sexually propositioned.
Greg Ellis reads Shai Shapira’s essay on why UBS could lead to despotism.

Greg Ellis reads Stephen Elliott’s essay about being accused of rape on the Shitty Media Men list in 2017.  

By Helen Joyce
In recent articles published in Vox and Cosmo, the slur 'TERF' has been associated with fringe political groups and transphobia. Here Helen Joyce argues that simply by recognising that biological sex is real, the majority of people would qualify as 'TERFs.'


By Aaron Sarin
Hongkongers see themselves “on the front line to fight against Communist China for the rest of the liberal world,” writes Aaron Sarin.


Despite the hype around AI, robots cannot yet determine the value systems that guide abductive reasoning--the key engine of human reasoning and innovation.


By Marilyn Simon
"The answer from the university is to put more and more restrictions on our behaviour so that the space for our personal lives is diminished—to turn us more into (paranoid) functionaries rather than full humans," writes Marilyn Simon.



Conservative intellectual Douglas Murray talks to Toby Young about the moral shortcomings of identity politics and the Marxist underpinnings of the Social Justice movement, both subjects of his new book  The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity .