The first presidential debate of 2020 was nearly-universally regarded as awful. It was a toddler slap-fight played by grown men with an absent referee. Fortunately, that doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened between the lines. Biden and Trump signaled their priorities with their focus. …

Beat the common misconceptions — The 2020 Presidential Debates are beginning in America, so prepare yourself for an onslaught of articles about who won, who lied, and who dressed the best. That’s all good entertainment but don’t take it too seriously. Those pieces miss the point of the debates in two key ways. Undecided voters don’t watch the debates Debates are…

There’s a rising backlash against “Social Justice Warriors” in pop culture and academia — The Left is experiencing a cultural sea change. Intellectual trends from the 1960s are coming to a head. The backlash has begun in earnest and it’s bubbling up to the surface of pop culture. The dominant ideology in academia and the artist sub-culture has many names: Social Justice Warriors, “cancel…

It’s time to fight smarter, not harder — The last 150 or so years have seen continuous efforts to defeat racism in America. It’s a noble goal, but unfortunately most aspiring racism-fighters have made their plans based on emotions (e.g. moral outrage) instead of using reason and social psychology. That’s made their efforts useless or even counterproductive. Instead…

If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last ten years, you’ve experienced the ascendance of “wokeness.” You can’t spend a minute on Twitter without seeing someone identify as a new gender or come up with a new definition for “racism.” With all this momentum you may feel…

Bad people always try to justify their bad behavior. Cheaters claim that everyone cheats and it’s no big deal. Thieves claim that they deserved what they filched and it was only fair that they took it. Racists claim that their behavior doesn’t count as racism. That’s a big problem when…

I was born and raised in Seattle. Last week I returned to the city that was my home for thirty years to visit my brother, still a true-blue Seattlite. While I was there I couldn’t resist touring the hotspot that’s bemused journalists across the nation. …

From Hell’s heart, I stab into my Kobe steak. For hate’s sake, I eat every last bite of it. I don’t even like meat, so the delicacy is pearls before swine. I’d rather have my daily ration of synthetic protein. The AI nutritionists are great at tailoring it to my…

We thirst for meaning in our lives. As an atheist, I’ve struggled to find meaning. I want to be part of something bigger than myself but never believed such a thing existed. I’ve learned better. As the psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl noted in his masterful Man’s Search for…