by Alon Levy There's a genre of shows, above the level of House or Friends and below that of The Wire, that exude high quality even if the actual level of characterization and plot isn't deep. Julian Fellowes' Downton Abbey is one of the prime examples of this genre. It's beautifully done and acted, has…

To complement my list of most overrated things, here’s my list of the most underrated things in the same categories. The same rules apply: everything I recommend has to be significantly worse-known or less supported than it should be. Literature: Pushkin. In Eastern Europe he’s of course not underrated, but here in the US surprisingly…

I wrote this note on Facebook while feeling somewhat contrarian. My rule here is that everything has to have a large number of defenders, and as small as possible a number of detractors. Of course everything here is culture-dependent; when a category makes sense only within a specific culture, I went with the West, or…

A charitable way of describing Jessica Valenti’s book, Full Frontal Feminism, is that it fails to reach out to anyone. People who already read feminist weblogs, such as Valenti’s Feministing, will already know everything Valenti says in her book. People who do not will find it either incomprehensible or unappealing. Less charitably, Valenti’s writing ranges…

Jane Jacobs attained a certain degree of fame after she published her iconoclastic approach to city planning in The Death and Life of American Cities in 1961. Subsequently she wrote two more books about cities that eclipsed The Death and Life in their level of iconoclasm; sadly, those books are still exceedingly off-mainstream. The first…

Environmentalists have been writing apocalyptic books for decades, but in recent years, more mainstream figures have written about the possible decline of current civilization. Jared Diamond’s Collapse concentrates on environmental pressure; Jane Jacobs’ Dark Age Ahead (largely motivated by the same work as Collapse—Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel) is more economic. Yet other works moralize…

The progressive left has always been based on a coalition of the oppressed or marginalized; in the West, this is now taken to include the poor, women, racial minorities, and sometimes gays and lesbians. But the actual constituents of the coalition evidently change over time, as after all, originally the coalition only included the working…

In most countries secularism is positively correlated with support for welfare, but does welfare make people more secular? Anthony Gill of the University of Washington says yes; in 2004, he and grad student Erik Lundsgaarde published a paper arguing that welfare provides a substitute for church attendance, making people less likely to attend church. The…

A lot of the problems in the debates over the Israel-Palestinian conflict stem from a truncated political gamut. The real gamut ranges from more anti-Israeli than Islamic Jihad to more anti-Arab than the settlers in the West Bank. That allows people who favor one side strongly to present their views as moderate and the views…

Reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate reminded me of most other polemical books I’d read that attempt to integrate some science into their works. In theory it’s a science book, a longwinded defense of both evolutionary psychology and its obvious social implications. But in practice, it’s mostly a political book; the science is provided only…

A lot of secularists mistakenly believe that religious discrimination is somehow different from racial discrimination. The tipping point that drove me to write this article was reading about Sam Harris’s beliefs about the acceptability of denying Muslims basic civil rights. Since being religious is a choice, the argument goes, there’s no real analogy between religion…

I presume that at the end of each year, pundits, writers, and bloggers gather to discuss the year’s political trends. Most of what they discuss is invariably pulled out of thin air, but I hope I’m basing my own analyses on enough evidence to escape that general description. It’s accurate to characterize 2004 as the…

I really wish the people in the United States, Canada, and Europe who complain that Muslims are destroying Western culture looked at earlier groups of immigrants. The same things that people say about Muslims—that they’re an alien culture, that they don’t respect democratic values, that they treat women badly—were also said about Jewish, Italian, and…

In previous installments of this column, I’ve written about racial oppression, and about how European racism against Muslim minorities is the primary fuel of modern Islamist terrorism. But now I feel I must explain that violence and extremism in general do not follow from oppression alone. Oppression helps nurture both, but what is important is…

Crossposted to Abstract Nonsense Science is a cumulative process. Although as Thomas Kuhn noted, scientific paradigms overthrow earlier paradigms and bring forth brand new theories, the process remains almost linearly progressive. Facts get tacked onto other facts; new observations falsify theories or prove them more solid; methods improve as scientists’ understanding of measurement and statistics…

Crossposted to Abstract Nonsense Americans who talk about racism usually think about anti-black racism in the United States, or perhaps about anti-Hispanic prejudice. So do many Europeans, who find it easier to criticize the treatment of black Americans by white Americans than the treatment of Muslim immigrants in Europe by white Europeans. It’s then a…

Crossposted to Abstract Nonsense The account of Dominionism given in Kingdom Coming, featuring a massive umbrella of Christian fundamentalist organizations united in their drive to establish a theocracy in the United States and by extension the world, sounds like a very depressing story. This is at least what every review I’ve found says: the reviewers…

We can bicker about whether 9/11 changed anything substantial in the politics of the West, but there is no doubt that in the Islamic world, especially among unassimilated Muslim minorities in non-Muslim-majority countries, it really did change everything. The attacks, and the American retaliation in Afghanistan, will probably turn out to have been as definitive…